Radui Wrote:
> BlockIO is only fast when a single task is working on the disks.

We found this to be incorrect. We use iSCSI target as a Virtual Tape Libray (VTL). The data in the VTL is also backed up to tape for offsite storage. This is single access, long sequential read, when being offloaded to physical tape and the peformance of file I/O is double that of block I/O. Block I/O gives no more than 30MB/sec, where as File I/O we get 60MB/sec.

We have done extensive testing with IO Meter and file I/O wins everytime. I don't understand why block I/O is the default when it's clearly slower (at least in our case anyway).