Ted, This is the type of information I was looking for. No seems to explain this well. Also, on the same topic. For a very large filesystem ie, 3TB, should I consider anything special, something like -O dir_index? I am looking for peek performance. TIA <div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 10:08 PM, Theodore Tso <<a href="mailto:tytso@mit.edu">tytso@mit.edu</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> <div class="Ih2E3d">On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 09:17:45PM -0400, Mag Gam wrote: > What happens if you use a hardware raid, should the stride option be > considered? It seems you are referring to software raid, correct? </div>It doesn't matter whethre it is hardware or software raid. What matters is the *geometry* of the RAID array. i.e., how many filesystem blocks are in an individual disk's stripe, and how many disks are in use (minus how many parity disks are in use). This information may be somewhat more hidden in a hardware raid array, but it is possible to extract this information, and most hardware raid arrays will allow you to configure these parameters as well, to varying degrees of flexibility. - Ted </blockquote></div>