SFW enables administrators to "tune" any type of striped volume, including RAID-5 and mirrored striped volumes, by adjusting the stripe unit size. This feature is particularly useful for optimizing the I/O performance of these volume types.
Most I/O-bound applications can be characterized as one of the following:
I/O-request intensive, making I/O requests faster than the hardware to which they are made can satisfy them: With rare exceptions, transaction-oriented applications (for example, credit verification, point of sale, order taking) are I/O-request intensive.
Data-transfer intensive, moving large single streams of data between memory and storage: Scientific, engineering, audio, video, and imaging applications are typically data-transfer intensive.
If a striped volume will be used predominantly for one or the other of these I/O load types, the stripe unit size can be set at volume creation to optimize I/O performance.