On Wed, Mar 14, 2001 at 08:41:46AM -0600, Greg Oster wrote:
> > or should I relabel and format my RAID1 before populating it with real data?
> 
> Benchmark it and see :)  If you have the time, newfs the RAID 1, and time the 
> extraction of pkgsrc.tar.gz.  Then change the disklabel as above, newfs, 
> and time the extraction again.  Pick the one that does the best :) 
> (Of course, multiple timings would be more accurate, but whether you decide to 
> do that depends on how scientific you want this experiment to be :) )
> I'd be curious to see the results, especially if one they were quite a bit 
> different...

Well, I did it, but looking at the results, I don't think it was worth
the trouble (well, at least I don't need to wonder any more):

bytes/sector: 512
sectors/track: 62
tracks/cylinder: 16
sectors/cylinder: 992
cylinders: 90796
total sectors: 90069632

root@orava /r/win # time tar zxf /o/pkgsrc.tar.gz
2.506u 16.696s 8:21.53 3.8%     0+0k 7064+164688io 0pf+0w
root@orava /r/win # time rm -r pkgsrc
0.260u 8.879s 6:13.35 2.4%      0+0k 12156+122163io 10pf+0w


bytes/sector: 512
sectors/track: 62
tracks/cylinder: 64
sectors/cylinder: 3968
cylinders: 22699
total sectors: 90069632

root@orava /r/win # time tar zxf /o/pkgsrc.tar.gz
2.393u 16.148s 8:22.93 3.6%     0+0k 7032+152046io 0pf+0w
root@orava /r/win # time rm -r pkgsrc
0.381u 8.564s 6:03.74 2.4%      0+0k 11726+110159io 10pf+0w


The number of I/O operations dropped a bit, but no dramatic improvements
in wall clock times of these operations were produced.

  -jm