December 2002
Intermediate to advanced
260 pages
9h 18m
English
Content preview from Managing RAID on LinuxBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Disk Access Protocols
The disk protocol of the hardware you choose has a tremendous impact on the performance and scalability of your array. Each protocol has its own hard limits on the maximum throughput of each I/O channel and the maximum number of devices you can attach to a single channel. So the disk protocol you select will have a direct impact on the maximum size of your array.
Although we traditionally think of RAID in terms of high-end SCSI systems, today it’s not uncommon for consumer-marketed systems to come equipped with support for RAID on non-SCSI disks. In fact, Linux software RAID can support either SCSI or ATA devices as part of an array (see the following section). The kernel will even let you mix these protocols within a single RAID device, although that arrangement isn’t recommended. (See the Matched drives section, later in this chapter, as well as the previous section, I/O Channels.) Software RAID under Linux does not rely on the underlying disk architecture to work, so there is no reason why an array could not be built using a Firewire (IEEE 1394), Fiber-channel, or other disk architecture developed in the future, as long as you can find hardware and device drivers to support the architecture as a standalone device.
ATA (used interchangeably with the acronym IDE) and SCSI are discussed in detail throughout this book because they are the most common disk protocols in use today. ATA is a part of every modern motherboard, and SCSI is the most common choice for ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.