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RAID arrays and NBM

Novell Cool Solutions: Question & Answer

Posted: 28 Sep 2005

Q:
What's the best RAID-array configuration for NBM?

A:
Here's my opinion: For the sys volume, just mirror the drives (raid 1) for redundancy. Then put the cache on a single TFS volume on a different phyisical drive (using 16k blocks, no compression, no suballocation). If your throughput and load *really* demands a faster, larger cache, make them separate volumes on individual disks instead of doing RAID5 or 0 or anything else. Having multiple, separate spindles on separate volumes allows NBM to maniplate the cache directory structure most efficiently. Data redunancy like RAID5 on a cache is not necessary, and actually hurts performance.

That said, users in general seems to overestimate how much cache they really need, and they often use far too much.

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