Nick Muhlbauer
Elknet Communications
Troy Cefaratti wrote:
>
> At 02:27 PM 2/2/98 -0800, you wrote:
> >Can someone offer some information regarding performance
> >improvements/degradation caused by drive mirroring and striping on NT 4?
> >
> >We recently added a second drive to our mail server and set it up as a
> >mirror drive. Since then, it seems to be slower in responding when sending
> >mail. It may just be perception, since I am paying more attention to the
> >machine now.
> >
> >We are running a PP150 w/128 MB Ram and 2- 2.1 GB SCSI on an Adaptec 2940.
> >
>
> Mirroring two drives will be slower due to the fact that the machine writes
> EVERYTHING to both drives. The advantages of mirroring are for data
> recovery should one drive fail.
>
> Striping the drives will give you increased speed because a file can be
> spanned accrossed all of the drives in strip set. (if you have a 3MB file,
> and a stripe set of 3 drives, it will write 1MB of the file to each drive).
>
> I currently have a strip set under winNT 4.0 consisting of three 5.1GB
> Maxtor IDE drives. This gives me a 15GB drive partition, and even though
> they are IDE drives (not even UltraDMA) it is surprisingly fast at data
> transfers.
>
> Striping does have its downside though. If one drive fails, you will lose
> the data on ALL the drives.
>
> It is because of this that striping WITH parity is a better choice for
> mission critical applications. And maybe even a "hot spare" drive in the
> array.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Troy Cefaratti mailto:mnementh@sbase1.com
> Cefaratti Network Solutions http://www.sbase1.com/
> StarBase One Communications mailto:webmaster@sbase1.com
> 425-A Superior Building
> 815 superior Avenue (216) 619-1500
> Cleveland, Ohio 44114
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