*BSD News Article 48217


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From: vernick@cs.sunysb.edu (Michael Vernick)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Can FreeBSD do disk striping?
Date: 2 Aug 1995 12:26:47 GMT
Organization: State University of New York at Stony Brook
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Ewan McPhail (chops@kestrel.ugrd.und.ac.za) wrote:
: Hi all, here's hoping someone can help me.

: Simply put, can FreeBSD (2.0.5 R) perform disk striping?
: I'm interested in doing this to take some of the load off a straining
: drive (more heads = less of a strain).

No.  For small normal NFS type reads, it does not pay to stripe
data across multiple drives.  Instead of paying for 1 seek and 
rotation per access on 1 drive, you now have N seeks and N rotations.
(Assuming the drive spindles are not synchronized.)  Why not put
different file systems on different drives to balance out the load some.

--
Michael Vernick                          vernick@sbcs.sunysb.edu
Dept. Of Computer Science @ SUNY SB      (516)-632-8434
Stony Brook, NY 11794