Hi Neil, Thanks for responding and thanks for confirming that the 32K block size should be fine. I think I'll stick with that.
As for my RAID partitioning question, I have a feeling that MacOS does it the opposite of how you say Windows does it. When I have a non-RAIDed single disk, there is a tab for partitioning it. When I was creating the RAID set, I believe that the instructions said I could drag either the entire disk/volume to the RAID set or just a partition. But once the RAID set was finalized, there was no longer a partition tab, either when selecting the entire RAID set or the individual components, so it did not appear that the RAID set could be partitioned. Thus, if I am remembering correctly, it sounds like partitions can be RAIDed, but that RAIDs can not be partitioned, at least via Disk Utility in Mavericks. Of course, I'm hoping to be wrong about the latter, so perhaps someone else will chime in. Thanks, Gregg On Oct 26, 2014, at 9:37 PM, Neil Laubenthal <n...@laubenthal.net> wrote: > On Oct 26, 2014, at 6:16 PM, Dinse, Gregg (NIH/NIEHS) [C] > <di...@niehs.nih.gov> wrote: >> >> 1. When creating the RAID sets, there was an option to choose the block >> size. The choices were 16K, 32K, 64K, 128K, or 256K. When the panel came >> up, it was set to 32K, which I assume is the default. I left it at 32K, but >> I was just wondering what value others might recommend. I know it depends >> on what I do with my Mac Pro, but I just wanted to make sure that 32K was a >> reasonable choice. I work with large videos once in a while, but rarely. >> Usually I just work with small files. Is 32K a good choice? > > Depends on the size of files your normally write…if lots of small files then > the 32K is better as you’ll have less wasted space as it is only assigned in > full blocks. Writing a 100 byte file uses up one block…be it 16K or 256K. > More blocks is more overhead by a little…but the drive controller will really > only notice it if you are writing really large files…that should be a bit > slower on smaller block size. > > Nothing wrong with 32K AFAIK. >> >> 2. I was thinking that I would create this RAID10 "disk" and then partition >> it, but there is no partition tab in Disk Utility for the RAID set. Is >> there a way to partition the 6-TB array, or do I have to start over and >> partition all 4 individual drives and then combine the various pieces into >> separate RAID sets? That sounds painful. > > I don’t think you can RAID partitions; IIRC the RAID process talks to the > drive at a lower level and uses the whole drive. I’ve never built a RAID on a > Mac…but when I was a Windows sysadmin we RAIDed and then partitioned into > what we needed all the time. > > Once you get the RAID built…did you try looking not on the RAID tab but on > the tab that shows all the drives. At that point (at least under Windows, as > I said I’ve not done it on a Mac) the RAID should show up as a single drive > and if you select the RAID instead of the individual mechanisms you should be > able to assign multiple partitions. > > ----------------------------------------------- > There are only three kinds of stress; your basic nuclear stress, cooking > stress, and A$$hole stress. The key to their relationship is Jello. > > neil _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list MacOSX-talk@omnigroup.com http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
