zfs discuss - Nov 2007 - which would be faster

So I have 8 drives total. 

5x500GB seagate 7200.10
3x300GB seagate 7200.10

I''m trying to decide, would I be better off just creating two separate
pools?

pool1 = 5x500gb raidz
pool2= 3x300gb raidz

or would I be better off creating one large pool, with two raid sets? 
I''m trying to figure out if it would be faster this way since it should
be striping across the two pools (from what I understand).  On the other hand,
the pool of 3 disks is obviously going to be much slower than the pool of 5.

In a perfect world I''d just benchmark both ways, but due to some
constraints, that may not be possible.  Any insight?
 
 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

On Tue, 20 Nov 2007, Tim Cook wrote:
> So I have 8 drives total.
>
> 5x500GB seagate 7200.10
> 3x300GB seagate 7200.10
>
> I''m trying to decide, would I be better off just creating two
separate pools?
>
> pool1 = 5x500gb raidz
> pool2= 3x300gb raidz
... reformatted ...
> or would I be better off creating one large pool, with two raid 
> sets?  I''m trying to figure out if it would be faster this way
since
> it should be striping across the two pools (from what I understand). 
> On the other hand, the pool of 3 disks is obviously going to be much 
> slower than the pool of 5.
>
> In a perfect world I''d just benchmark both ways, but due to some 
> constraints, that may not be possible.  Any insight?
>
Hi Tim,

Let me give you a 3rd option for your consideration.  In general, 
there is no "one-pool-fits-all-workloads" solution.  On a 10 disk 
system here, we ended up with a:

5 disk raidz1 pool
2 disk mirror pool
3 disk mirror pool

Each have their strengths/weaknesses.  The raidz set is ideal for 
large file sequential access type workloads - but the IOPS are 
limited to the IOPS of a single drive.  The 3-way mirror is 
ideal for a workload with a high read to write ratio - which describes 
many real-world type workloads (e.g. software development) - since ZFS 
will load balance read ops amoung all members of the mirror set.  So 
read IOPS is 3x the IOPS rating of a single disk.

I would suggest/recommend you configure a 5 disk raidz1 pool (with the 
500Gb disks) and a 2nd pool using a 3-way mirror.  You can then match 
pool/filesystems to the best fit with your different workloads.

Remember the incredibly useful blogs at: http://blogs.sun.com/relling/ 
(Thank you Richard) to determine the relative reliability/failure 
rates of different ZFS configs.

PS: If we had to do it over, I''d probably go with a 6-disk raidz2, 
in place of the 5-disk raidz1 - due to the much higher relibility of 
that config.

Regards,

Al Hopper  Logical Approach Inc, Plano, TX.  al at logical-approach.com
            Voice: 972.379.2133 Fax: 972.379.2134  Timezone: US CDT
OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) Member - Apr 2005 to Mar 2007
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/ogb/ogb_2005-2007/
Graduate from "sugar-coating school"?  Sorry - I never attended! :)

> On the other hand, the pool of 3 disks is obviously
 > going to be much slower than the pool of 5

while today that''s true, "someday" io will be
balanced by the latency of vdevs rather than
the number... plus two vdevs are always going
to be faster than one vdev, even if one is slower
than the other.

so do 4+1 and 2+1 in the same pool rather than
separate pools. this will let zfs balance
the load (always) between the two vdevs rather than
you trying the balance the load between pools.

			Rob