vinum and hot-swapping

Dan Nelson dnelson at allantgroup.com
Sun Jul 13 12:14:58 PDT 2003


In the last episode (Jul 13), Andrea Venturoli said:
> ** Reply to note from "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog at freebsd.org> Sat, 12 Jul 2003 17:13:29 +0930
> > The real performance penalty for RAID-5 is simply that writes require 
> > so much I/O.  Expect 25% of the write performance of RAID-0.
> 
> Ok, I must ask this: Shouldn't SCSI system allow paralell writes on
> different disks? If so, why so much penalty?

Parallel I/Os are already being used.  A short write on a RAID-5 array
requires you to

1) Read the original block and the parity block (done in parallel)

2) XOR the parity block with the original block and the new block

3) Write the new block and the parity block (done in parallel)

Which means that you're doing 4 times the I/O that a plain RAID-5 read
would do.  There's no getting around this problem for small random
writes.  Repeated writes to the same locations only cost two writes,
since the original and parity blocks are probably still in cache.

There is a threshold point where this stops being an issue, however. 
When your write size becomes larger than the raid-5 stripe width
(stripe size * number of data disks), you can simply calculate the
parity block directly and not have to read anything.  At this point,
raid-5 magically becomes as efficient as raid-0 :)

I don't believe vinum can optimize full-stripe writes, though, since
FreeBSD can only do I/O in 64k max chunks, and since vunum is software
instead of battery-backed hardware RAID, it cannot hold off on multiple
writes until the stripe fills up.  Most hardware RAIDs do parity-block
caching and long write optimizations.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com


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