What is gstripe ?

[Eric Anderson]

On 01/12/07 18:47, Jeremie Le Hen wrote:
> Hi list,
> 
> Please forgive me, I know this is a dumb question.  I've checked the
> manpage, Wikipedia [1], Webopedia [2] and a few other documents,
> but I'm still not sure to fully understand the striping concept.
> 
> gmirror(8) provides RAID-1 and is very easy to understand.
> gconcat(8) is easy to grasp as well.
> 
> However, I'm experiencing some difficulties to understand gstripe(8).
> I would say it's a kind of smart disk concatenation which stores
> block X on disk (X % N), where N is the number of disk in the RAID-0.
> This permits faster read/write.
> 
> Am I right ?
> 
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_striping
> [2] http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html
> 
> Thank you.
> Best regards,


Yea, that's pretty close!  A stripe (RAID 0 - called that because it 
really isn't redundant in any way) is just like you described.  Write 
one block to the first disk, then the next block to the next disk, etc. 
  It distributes your read/write activity to increase performance. 
Sequential read/write performance may not be affected, but random IO 
should get a nice boost.  See this site for some pretty graphics:

http://www.raid.com/04_00.html

or more specifically:

http://www.raid.com/04_01_00.html

Eric


-- 
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Eric Anderson        Sr. Systems Administrator        Centaur Technology
An undefined problem has an infinite number of solutions.
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