Disk Striping
For reasons that I don’t really understand, November seems to be disk month for me. A year ago in this column, we looked at the Linux Logical Volume Manager, which allows you to combine and subdivide sets of disks in arbitrary ways. This month, we will consider disk striping while focusing primarily on how this is provided by the Linux disk striping facility.
Thursday, November 15th, 2001
For reasons that I don’t really understand, November seems to be disk month for me. A year ago in this column, we looked at the Linux Logical Volume Manager, which allows you to combine and subdivide sets of disks in arbitrary ways. This month, we will consider disk striping while focusing primarily on how this is provided by the Linux disk striping facility.
Disk striping is a technique for replicating or dividing I/O operations among multiple disks to meet performance or fault tolerance goals. To accomplish this, the Linux disk striping facility implements the RAID standard. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.
The most prevalent form and usage of RAID is I/O fault tolerance. A RAID device consists of two or more physical disks that are combined into a single abstract unit as far as the rest of the system is concerned. The individual disks can be combined in several ways:
