Robert Heller wrote: > > I suspect that this is a simular case to what I did: I have a server > with 4 drives. I have several (small) RAID1 partitions (/boot, /, > /usr, /var, etc.) with 4 mirrors and one large RAID5 with three > partitions and a hot spare (a LVM volumn group, containing /home and > some other partitions). I would guess that the admin with the "8-way > RAID1 for the OS" probably also has a 6 or 8 disk RAID5 or RAID6 for > the bulk of the disks Yup. 8 way RAID1 for the OS, 8 way RAID6 for the data. I was hoping when I setup the 8-way RAID1 for the OS that I would get really good read speeds since md is supposed to stripe reads from RAID1, but in practice the RAID6 completely kills it for read performance (~61 MB/sec from the RAID1 partition vs ~200 MB/sec from the RAID6 partition). In a deeply ironic turn of events, one of the hard drives in that machine died in a way that freaked the hardware controller driver out and caused a kernel panic last week. The machine wouldn't finishing booting until I physically removed the bad drive. The RAID1 was fine afterwards, but the RAID6 had to be manually re-assembled (no corruption, it just wouldn't automatically start until I intervened). -- Benjamin Franz