Stripe size of RAID-array

[john99]

Hello,

what RAID Stripe-Unit(16K, 32K, 64K, 128K, 256K, 512K or 1024K) size is recommended for a standard Zimbra installation?


Thank you for your feedback!

John


PS:
It's not yet clear what RAID-level we are finally going to use

[MrZillNet]

This is a tough problem for anyone doing RAID (I recommend either RAID1 or RAID10 btw for the RAID level).

If you have a test environment, install the "sysstat" utilities (yum install sysstat on RH and CentOS). Then run "iostat -xk 5" in a terminal window while doing things with Zimbra. This will show you the number of read and write requests along with the total amount read or written - divide the total amount read by the number of requests and that will show you the amount transferred on average.

My guess is 128K will turn out to be optimal for you, but this is based on my setup, not yours.

[dijichi2]

parity striping raid is great tradeoff of space/performance, but for many small writes such as messaging systems, if the raid system is not up to it, it can impact performance somewhat. this has been discussed in the forums, although i'm sure how in much detail. although it's not a 100% correlation, I think the smaller stripe/chunk for messaging is probably better, as MrZillNet says around 64/128k.

raid1/10 is strongly recommended for non-SAN solutions, if you can afford the extra redundancy.