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Re: Software RAID and drive failures



On Tue, 2003-03-11 at 14:30, Kirk Strauser wrote:
> At 2003-03-11T18:41:12Z, Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net> writes:
> 
> > Why wouldn't you get parallel reads, especially if you do async IO?
> 
> I guess a better example would be when two files are accessed, and each
> has blocks that physically reside on the same two drives.  Imagine that both
> files are accessed randomly and concurrently (think multiple database
> instances).  In this case, it could very well happen that blocks from file1
> (f1a, f1b) and file2 (f2a, f2b) are being read simultaneously.  In this
> case, both drives are jumping back and forth between f1a/f2a and f1b/f2b.

2 issues:
1. Tagged command queuing should order the reads.
2. As a DBA, it seems to me that this possibility is irrelevant, since
   the DBMS would have sucked those blocks (and their neighbors) into
   it's cache after the 1st 1 or 2 db read requests.

> Imagine, instead, that file1 and file2 are on a mirror.  The RAID system
> could converge on the situation where the first drive is "dedicated" to
> file1, and the second is "dedicated" to file2.
> 
> I don't think this is a particularly unlikely scenario.

Are controllers smart in that way?

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| Ron Johnson, Jr.        mailto:ron.l.johnson@cox.net          |
| Jefferson, LA  USA      http://members.cox.net/ron.l.johnson  |
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| Spit in one hand, and wish for peace in the other.            |
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