[Discuss] samba devices and RAID

[noel at natnix.com]

The problem is the protocol stack you have to go through if you build
RAID on top of loopback files on top of Samba.  Consider a disk write:

filesystem write -> loopback block device -> raid device <-> samba server

keep in mind the raid device could do multiple block read/writes to your
samba server.


In drbd it would be:

filesystem write -> drbd device <-> drbd server

The SMB protocol itself is quite slow.  Hopefully drbd would be more
efficient, being designed for this kind of network RAID.

--Noel





On Fri, Nov 10, 2006 at 02:09:11PM -0800, pw wrote:
> noel at natnix.com wrote:
> >I don't quite get what you're trying to do, but if you want RAID over a
> >network, check these out:
> >
> >http://www.drbd.org/
> >
> >http://www.it.uc3m.es/~ptb/nbd/
> >
> >You could theoretically make a RAID out of a couple of loopback devices
> >on network drives, but I'd expect the performace would be horrible.  
> >
> >--Noel
> 
> 
> NBD might work. The idea of the (cheap)NAS 1U boxes was
> to have them directly connected by local Gb ethernet.
> Then again, I could just connect an (expensive) eSATA RAID box
> and do the same thing without ethernet.
> 
> My personal preference would be to just do local RAID.
> 
> Peter
>