[dm-devel] raid10 ... (was: Re: ANNOUNCE: mdadm 1.7.0)

[Jure Peèar]

On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 09:04:21 +1000
Neil Brown <neilb at cse.unsw.edu.au> wrote:

> Data is laid out in a raid0 style, but multiple copies of each chunk
> are possible.  There can be "near" copies, where copies of the one
> block are at the same or similar offsets in different drives, and
> "far" copies, where copies of the one block are at a substantial
> offset from one drive to the next.

... this really fuels my imagination.

Imagine having a pool of drives, where chunks of data are distributed evenly
across all drives in a redundant manner. If one drive dies, the chunks that
are not redundant anymore get their copies on the remaining drives, provided
that there's enough space left; if one or more drives are added to the
array, new chunks are written there until the balance is reached again.

Disk space could be the first key for balancing across the drives, with
transfer rate or seek time maybe added later. Maybe the pool could even
adapt dinamically to the i/o patterns ... 

Am i dreaming (it's well over 4am here :) ? Or is something like this
possible? Maybe not with a md personality, but by some daemon that would be
taking care of a dm map?


-- 

Jure Pečar