Stewart Williams wrote: > John R Pierce wrote: > >> Stewart Williams wrote: >> >>> The block I/O is the thing that concerns me as mostly I am serving a >>> 650MB file via samba to 5 clients and I think this is where I need the >>> speed. >>> >> is this a sequential or random access application thats using this >> file? is it read only/mostly, or is it random update? >> > > I'm not sure, how can I find this out? > well, what is the nature of the application thats using this file? do you really mean just a single 650MB (sub 1GB) file? is this something like a quickbooks file? (thats kind of what it sounds like from your other answers). given what you have now, and what information we've been given, I would A) disable BIOS raid, configuring it for JBOD w/ ACHI enabled B) mdadm mirror disks 0 and 1, and put the OS on that C) mdadm mirror disks 2 and 3, and put your shared SMB filesystem on that