Re: [gentoo-user] [Even More OT] Fragmentation of my drives. Curious mostly

[Joshua Murphy]

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 5:07 PM, Anthony Metcalf <nevyn@××××××××××.uk> wrote:
> Ignoring the MS/*nix argument for a moment.....
>
> How does fragmentation work on hardware RAID?
>
> The normal argument of more fragmentation = more seeks = worse
> performance would seem to be eliminated by a controller with a large
> cache and lots of drives (say a Dell/Equallogic PS5000E in RAID 10.....).
>
> A

Assuming a level that performs striping, it would be alleviated, yes,
but even striping is at its fastest when performing sequential reads,
it just reads sequentially from more than one disk at a time... but
the fact that one disk will likely be reading while another performs a
seek would probably reduce the impact of the seeks considerably.

(all of this is, of course, purely pulling from my understanding of
raid and how it operates and could very well be 100% incorrect)

-- 
Poison [BLX]
Joshua M. Murphy