October 20, 2009, 7:33 pm
Given the price of hard drives and the number of drives you can put into a single system albeit a desktop or a server, a very common question is how to arrange the drives to improve performance. Consequently, a somewhat commonly asked Linux storage question that you see on various mailing lists is, which is better for data striping, RAID-0 with mdadm or LVM? While many people will correctly point out that this argument is somewhat pointless because each is really intended for different tasks, the question is still fairly common. Nonetheless, in the quest for the best performance possible, there is still the question of which one is better (whether it‚Äôs meaningless or not). In this article both concepts will be contrasted in regard to performance with some discussion about appropriateness. To add at least a little chaos to the situation, some simple IOzone benchmarks with RAID-0 and LVM will be presented…