I hope everyone is having a good time gearing up for the holidays.   Throwback Thursday is a bi-weekly blog series where I dig deep into my evernote collection and find some great content on a single subject and share it with you.  In the third installment of the Throwback Thursday series we are going to cover some helpful SQL Server disk articles.

IOPS Calculator – This is a great tool to figure out how many IOPS you should get from your storage configuration. It’s also a helpful tool for estimating how many disks are needed to support your workload if you are purchasing new storage.

The Fundamental of Storage Systems – We couldn’t talk about storage and SQL Server without mentioning my friend Wes Brown. He has a plethora of information on this subject including this is a great blog series that hits all the basics.

Storage Top 10 Best Practices – A great quick list of best practices for storage with SQL Server provide by Microsoft. Over time, I have seen all of these best practices be neglected. I neglected a few myself when I was starting out and I paid for it.

Benchmark SQL Server Disk Latency – The following is how I benchmark disk latency with SQL Server. Remember this is just for SQL Server so you also want to take a look at perfmon too to verify if SQL Server is the cause to your I/O problems.

Measuring Disk Latency with Windows Performance Monitor –  Perfmon (Windows Performance Monitor) is the gold standard for measuring disk performance inside of windows. Have you ever wondered what exactly is included in the stack when you look at Avg Disk reads/sec? Jeff Huges does a great job of answering this question and some others you might not be thinking about.

Analyzing I/O Characteristics and Sizing Storage Systems for SQL Server Database Applications – This white paper by Microsoft is a great guide for sizing your I/O characteristics.  Its a great reference guide to use to understand how to not only benchmark I/O but also understand how to understand how SQL does I/O and also how to size your storage structure correctly.

How It Works: Bob Dorr’s SQL Server I/O Presentation – Want to know how I/O works in SQL Server? This is article on CSS SQL Engineers blog by Bob Dorr is your best starting point. It also has tons of links for great additional reading on how SQL Server works with disks. For example, Bob’s write up on SQL 2000 I/O basics is still relevant today.

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