Subject: Re: comparing raid-like filesystems
To: Jason R Thorpe <thorpej@wasabisystems.com>
From: Thor Lancelot Simon <tls@rek.tjls.com>
List: current-users
Date: 02/01/2003 00:24:12
On Fri, Jan 31, 2003 at 06:17:30PM -0800, Jason R Thorpe wrote:
>
> Let's face it, we can do better. RAID card vendors put RAID 0,1,5
> implementations into reasonably small amounts of flash every day ..
> I mean, the firmware updates fit easily onto a floppy with lots of
> room to spare. And then they proceed to run that firmware on i960s,
> which aren't the fastest CPUs around.
It's noteworthy that:
1) Last time I picked one of those update floppies apart, the i960
code on it turned out to be LZW-compressed. Is RAIDframe really
more than 2MB of object code?
2) It's just plain *astounding* how inefficient some of those
implementations are. On hardware with comparable memory bandwidth
and CPU cycles available, *and lacking hardware XOR support*, with
the same disks, RAIDframe is often considerably faster. I have
never understood how some RAID vendors' firmware can consistently
perform so poorly.
--
Thor Lancelot Simon tls@rek.tjls.com
But as he knew no bad language, he had called him all the names of common
objects that he could think of, and had screamed: "You lamp! You towel! You
plate!" and so on. --Sigmund Freud