Mirrored striped logical volume performance implications

AIX allows striping and mirroring together on the same logical volume.

This feature provides a convenient mechanism for high-performance redundant storage. Measurements indicate that read and file system write performance of striping and mirroring is approximately equal to the unmirrored case, assuming you have twice as many disks.

File system writes benefit from caching in the file system, which allows considerable overlap of writes to disk with the program initiating the writes. The raw write performance suffers. Because it is synchronous, both writes must complete before control is returned to the initiating program. Performing larger writes increases raw write throughput. Also, Mirror Write Consistency (MWC) affects the performance of this case.

In summary, striping and mirroring allow redundant storage for very high-performance access.