Greg emailed me a great question from my week of warehousing webinar the other day. We were discussing disk performance and kept saying the term “spindles”as in using more of them to increase performance and throughput. The term means an individual hard drive in array. Many large disk systems have trays of disks that are logically allocated to something called a LUN or Logical Unit Number, or in Windows terms, a logical drive that windows can see and SQL Server can write to. There are a few other layers in there, but we’ll keep it there for today. The term spindle came from the fact that inside a hard drive are spindles that help store and retrieve the data. Therefore when you’re working in a high throughput environment the more “spindles” or disks assigned to your Logical drive that is assigned to data, or tempdb, etc.. the better your performance should be. 

The best way to determine the number is through some testing up front and then working with your SAN vendor as they will have some good capacity estimations to get you started. Just make sure you don’t use all the spindles in an array so you can easily expand if you are running low.

Great Question Greg !