I presume you're talking about the interleave factor? Since you say large, and 65536, I assume you're saying 64MB stripes? (64K disk blocks, 32K bytes, wouldn't be "large".)

Is there a good reason for doing that? I would think you'd get a much better performance boost by going with interleaved stripes somewhere between the size of a filesystem cluster to a unit the size of the smallest drive's cache. (When I say "cluster", I am referring to the size of a filesystem block -- 8 fragments -- not a disk block -- 512 bytes.)

I have been going with a 128 block (64K) interleave, since that's half the size of my drives' caches, and is the size of four filesystem clusters (whichh I have allocated as 16K).

Any bigger than that and you lose all the benefits of interleaved access. In fact, I have considered reducing it to 16K so it would interleave on single-cluster sizes.

On the other hand, if you get too fine of an interleave, you can get inefficient since the ccd driver will be doing a lot of work reading in lots of small pieces and assembling them.

Still, I can't think of any reason you'd ever want 64MB interleaved stripes. I don't see any benefit in such an arrangement.

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