9 Oct
2003
9 Oct
'03
00:00
> -----Original Message----- > From: Carlos E. R. [mailto:robin1.listas@tiscali.es] > Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2003 2:11 PM > To: suse-linux-e@suse.com > Subject: Re: [SLE] Raid 0 speed question > > > > price difference I could just as well get a 7200rpm 8mb > cache drive. > > What I would really like to know is how striping (sp?) the 5400rpm > > discs with kernel based software raid would perform > compared to a new > > 7200rpm disc. The ones I've built into new machines lately > - mostly > > the standard Seagate 7200rpm 2mb cache models - are really > much faster > > than the drive I have. > > Probably the 7200 rpm disk alone would be faster even without raid :-) > If this is any help, I can tell you my experience with striped drives. I used striping a number of years back with Windows 2000 Pro. I had a 10GB and a 15GB drive so I partitioned the 5 of the 15 to the OS and swap file and striped the remaining 10GB with the 10GB drive. The result was much faster disk access on those things in the stripe. It was noticeable but not twice as fast. I quit using striping when the 10GB drive died. (Maxtor had to replace 8 drives in 2 years for me. A bad spell for some reason.) As for speed of mixed speed drives, I believe you will be hurting your speed by mixing a high speed with a slower speed HDD in striping. The 7200 speed drive will share write time with the 5400 resulting an average between the two drives. But it will leave you with a common average speed. Just for the fun of it, I did stripe three HDDs once. Now that was worth the effort, but with a CDR and DVD, I can't have 3 HDDs installed. I have been reading about RAID in Linux and see that with 3 HDDs, you can get the striping with error correction so you can get both speed and security. I can't tell you the best way to go, that's your decision. I am guessing that if it were me, I would go with the faster drive and leave open the possibility of expanding with a second and third drive in the future. That's where I would stripe them, giving me the security of the RAID 5 (I believe) at just less than 3x the speed of one drive. All this talk made me look at a pair of 20GB drives sitting next to me. Maybe striping them on this old IBM I am using to learn Linux on would be fun. lol Good luck Buck