[mirror-admin] Breaking the 1TB limit?

[Dax Kelson]

On Mon, 2010-02-22 at 13:27 -0700, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:

> Most of my experience has been helping people try to get data off of
> them at one point or another. The big issue with the large disks are
> that they are slow. You can overload them pretty quickly to the point
> where you may have 16 TB of data in your raid, but effectively you can
> only use 1-4 because of load :(. Maybe the larger block sizes will
> help with this.. but a lot of it is just how many platters you can
> read/write at once (at 5400 to 7200 RPM versus 10-15k)

I'm genuinely curious if this is the case for I/O patterns that public
mirrors see? I only run a private low volume mirror, so I don't know.

Are the "big slow" disks really the bottleneck compared to WAN
bandwidth? Are file requests so random that the memory cache can't
sufficiently speed up the "big slow" disks?

Dax Kelson

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