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Date:      Sun, 8 Aug 1999 16:40:24 +0930
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To:        Andreas Klemm <andreas@klemm.gtn.com>
Cc:        John-Mark Gurney <gurney_j@resnet.uoregon.edu>, cvs-committers@FreeBSD.org, cvs-all@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: src/sys/dev/vinum vinuminterrupt.c
Message-ID:  <19990808164024.E10056@freebie.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <19990808085758.A2467@titan.klemm.gtn.com>; from Andreas Klemm on Sun, Aug 08, 1999 at 08:57:59AM %2B0200
References:  <199908070806.BAA66984@freefall.freebsd.org> <19990807181938.49481@hydrogen.fircrest.net> <19990808105939.A10056@freebie.lemis.com> <19990808085758.A2467@titan.klemm.gtn.com>

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On Sunday,  8 August 1999 at  8:57:59 +0200, Andreas Klemm wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 08, 1999 at 10:59:39AM +0930, Greg Lehey wrote:
>> On Saturday,  7 August 1999 at 18:19:38 -0700, John-Mark Gurney wrote:
>>> Greg Lehey scribbled this message on Aug 7:
>>>>   Import RAID-5 code.
>>>>   1.12      +224 -3    src/sys/dev/vinum/vinuminterrupt.c
>>>
>>> so, does this mean that you can use RAID-5 w/o having to buy anything?
>>
>> Yes.
>
> How fast would RAID5 be with a AHA2940 and 3 IBM DORS disks connected to
> it (5400U/Min, 5.4 MB/sec using bonnie). Is it still fast, 50% of speed ...

That depends on what you're doing.  bonnie doesn't really tell you
very much; you need to measure the raw throughput.  Also, it depends
on what kind of load you're putting on it.  Do you intend to have
multiple processes accessing the volume at the same time?  What's your
read/write ratio?  RAID-5 is slow on writes, but fast enough on reads.

Having said that, 3 drives isn't very much for RAID-5.  You use a
third of the space for parity, and you don't get the read performance
benefits that you'd get with more drives.

To measure both conventional drives and Vinum volumes, use rawio
(ftp://ftp.lemis.com/pub/rawio.tar.gz).

> I know difficult to say ... but only want to know, if it's a doable
> compromise instead of doing hardware RAID...

There's currently no reason to believe that hardware RAID will give
you better performance until you start to max out the CPU, which
appears unlikely.

Greg
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