James Zhou 2000

Creating a stripped volume for best performance ...

In the past few days, I have been working with IT to set up a fast system for real-time display. Our target is to build a system that provide sequential read up to 700MB/s from disk to memory. The OS is Windows Vista. The disk array comes from Silicon Image but the chipset seems to be Nvidia chipset.

In our application, we do not care about data security so we do not need any redundancy or protection. What we need is the maximum performance for sequential read. The best way to configure the disk array is obviously a straightforward stripping. But it turns out the configuration is not that straightforward first. We have finally figured out in order to get the best performance, we need to configure the hardware in JBOD mode, and then use utility to configure all disks into “pass-thru” mode. In that mode, all the available disks are visible in Vista’s disk management tool. Then we can use dynamic disks to create one stripped volume using all the available disks. The performance according to our test, has reached 600MB/s when using 15 disks.

The JBOD with software stripped volumes provide best possible performance, but there is no fault tolerance in that mode.

posted by jameszhou2000 @ 11:58 AM