Help choose RAID stripe size

[chipped]

Hi

I'm setting up a RAID array for work which will just be used for general data storage, like home directories, documents, media files etc.

The majority (90% roughly) of it is large videos (1GB-10GB), they're accessed often, the rest is home directories and documents, typically containing files under 1MB in size. All types of files are accessed often (it's a school so office use documents and teaches like to use videos in class).

I've been reading that people tend to recommend large stripe size for larger files and small stripe size for smaller files. However will choosing a large stripe size such as 512K have negative impact on home folders that have small files?

Which got me thinking, would something like 128K get me the best of both worlds?

How about NTFS allocation size, would that have a big affect on performance too?

I have 12 x 4TB drives on a Dell MD1200 and Dell H800 RAID card.

All recommendations and advice will be very much appreciated.

Cheers

 

[Chandler]

this means if you have a 1.5mb file, it will be a litte bigger and take up just a tad bit more space. I would go with the larger stripe for performance with the media. in reality it won't make a difference for you though.

 

[chipped]

So you reckon go large, like 1MB stripe then?

What about the NTFS allocation size?

Thanks

 

[patrickdk]

I would go for something like 64k per disk in the stripe., maybe 128k

So likely strip size of 1mb or even larger.

for ntfs, really depends. Most likely I would just set it to 64k, unless you think there will be like a million or so small files (<64k)

If you want something inbetween, 16k could be an option also.