Re: Raid 5 on Sun arrays

We installed 2 model 201 (2.1GB Fast/Wide SCSI)arrays on 2 new systems. I performed tests on stripe sizes from 16K to 2048K. I did timing on the tbload function (for writes). Also an Indexed read query that I knew the performance on the old system and drives (2.9GB Fast/Wide SCSI). I also noticed no appreciable difference between any of the stripe sizes. We didn't evaluate raid 5 due to our usage of Veritas and Informix's 2GB limit per DBspace. We are using using 512K as our stripe size. It was one of the better performing sizes and it calculated closely with the size relating to the blocking factor of the drive and our system's 2K page size. It's been in production since 12/95. Only complaint the 2.1GB drives don't seem as reliable as the 2.9GB. Facts of the test system 8CPU SUN SPARCenter 2000E 1GB memory Solaris 2.4 Informix 5.04UC1 database size ~16GB (mirrored with Informix) Separate dbspaces (also striped volumes) for physcial logs, logical logs and root dbspace. chunks are striped across 10 disk drives and all 6 controllers. Read to Write ratio ~190:1 Chris Cox clc@litle.com