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Date: Thu, 21 Nov 1996 12:15:12 -0800 (PST)
From: Jaye Mathisen  <mrcpu@cdsnet.net>
To: michael butler <imb@scgt.oz.au>
cc: "Darrin R. Woods" <dwoods@netgazer.com>, hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Disk Striping
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Uh, by definition, isn't striping spreading the load across spindles?

I realize it's a tad more complicated than that, but the essence is the
same.

On Thu, 21 Nov 1996, michael butler wrote:

> Date: Thu, 21 Nov 1996 14:51:56 +1100 (EST)
> From: michael butler <imb@scgt.oz.au>
> To: "Darrin R. Woods" <dwoods@netgazer.com>
> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: Disk Striping
> 
> Darrin R. Woods writes:
> 
> > I just got my news server up and running INN (thanks to everyone that
> > helped), but now I'm looking for a better way of dealing with it.  I've got
> > 3 Fast/Wide 4gb disks to hold news.  It would be a lot easier (and better
> > performance) if I could stripe (or span) the /var partition accross the 3
> > disks instead of having to guess as to how to partition each drive and into
> > what sizes.
> 
> With "only" three drives, you don't want to stripe across them.
> 
> There are four activities which consume disk resources:
> 
> 	i) maintenance of the active and history files
> 	ii) maintenance of the overview hierarchy
> 	iii) writing out the articles themselves
> 	iv) scribbling to /var/log/news
> 
> Whilst the latter is comparatively "cheap" as it simply extends an existing
> file (writes deferred by caching), the first three are best spread across
> separate spindles for the best resultant performance. Striping or
> concatenation will hurt more than help,
> 
> 	michael
>