Hi,

I'm planning a new Linux box and have 2 sata drives of 160 GB behind the same controller. Win xp also has to live there somewhere and I want optimal performance on the disk subsystem. I don't care much for availability. So I want to use striping on these disks. For ease of maintanence, I also want to use lvm2. Both md and lvm2 offer striping. I am planning to set up linux partitions on both sata drives at the outer tracks and stripe them together using either md or lvm2. My questions are:

What would be better to use for striping: lvm2 of md? If I use md I will put linear lvm2 on top of the md managed stripe set. That means 2 software layers extra in the disk subsystem, so that would burn some extra cpu cycles. I've read in some old (2001) mailing list archives lvm striping is more cpu consuming than md and nowhere near md's performance, so I tend to go for lvm2 on top of md. Problem is, this info is rather old and based on lvm1.

I have 2 SATA controllers on my main board, a via and a promise. The via is a fraction faster. Would it be better to put each sata drive on it's own controller? Normally I would say yes, but these are different controllers when it comes to performance.

I will use reiserfs as my filesystem (I know ext2 is faster, but fsck on 160 GB...). Are there any recommendations on chunksizes for lvm2 or md stripes with reiserfs in mind.

I will be using Suse Pro 9.2 amd64

Thanks for any info on this.