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Posts Tagged ‘spindles’

As I tackle more and more disk performance related issues, I thought it was time to create a series of blogposts about spindles, seektimes, latency and all that stuff. For now part 1, which covers the basics. Things like raid type, rotational speeds and seektimes basically make up “how fast you will go”. On to the dirty details!

Introduction to physical disks and their behaviour

So what is really important when looking at physical disks, and their performance? Firstly and most important, we must look at the storage system parameters in order to reduce disk latencies. In order to be able to do this properly, we have to take into account the characteristics of the I/O what is being performed. Secondly, we have to look at segment sizes within the chosen raid types (which in turn followes from the system parameters). Finally, we’ll deepdive into alignment (which still appears to be misunderstood by a lot of people)
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