Compaq 3200 manual Performance Enhancement, Distributing Data and Data Striping, E-11

E-11

Performance Enhancement

Drive arrays enable data access performance to be dramatically enhanced over non-arrayed drives. In addition, the Smart Array 3200 Controller has several other performance enhancement features that are discussed in this section.

Distributing Data and Data Striping

Distributing data makes it possible to access data concurrently from multiple drives in an array. This yields I/O rates many times faster than non-arrayed drives. Data striping allows data distributing.

Data striping is automatically generated on an array controller to store user data. A stripe is a collection of contiguous data that is distributed evenly across all physical drives in a logical drive. The width of the stripe (the amount stored on each physical drive) is selected to optimize the performance of the operating system.

Compaq Smart Array 3200 Controller Reference Guide