New Article: Rethinking RAID (on Linux)

My latest article is now available on the ADMIN Magazine website and is called “Rethinking RAID (on Linux).” ADMIN Magazine is owned by Linux News Media, owners of Linux Magazine.

Conventional wisdom has always dictated that spreading I/O load across more disk drives instead of bottlenecking a single drive does help significantly when increasing one’s workload. For instance, if instead of writing to a single disk drive you split the I/O requests and write that same amount of data in a stripe across multiple drives (e.g., RAID0), you are reducing the amount of work that a single drive must perform to accomplish the same task. For magnetic spinning disks (i.e., hard disk drives, HDDs), the advantages should be more noticeable. The time it takes to seek across a medium introduces latency, and with randomly accessed I/O patterns, the I/O throughput suffers as a result on a single drive. A striped approach does not solve all the problems, but it does help a bit. In this article, I look at something entirely different. I spend more time focusing on increasing read throughput by way of RAID1 mirrors.

Again, you can read the full article here.