May 4, 2006 at 5:58 am
How are people handling the space on servers now that the disk drives are so large. If you get three disks in a raid configuration do you create one 'C' drive for the entire space or will performance be better if you partition it into 3 or 4 drive letters so that you can get more queues. This now has come up with the fact the disk drive are now larger. In the past we would mirror two drives and put the OS and the MS SQL binaries on the 'C' and then put the databases and logs on the other or others. Has anyone done is testing to see if using multiple drive letters on a raid 5 setup will give any better performance? We like to here opinions. Again this really pertains to local internal disks, when we use a SAN we are spread wide and control that with individual luns. Thanks John G
May 4, 2006 at 6:13 am
You are always better creating seperate drive arrays. s before most peopl stick with mirroring for OS and Bootable partition as C, Applications an executable Binaries are still common to D in mirror. The a single RAID 5 is the least most do for E: and the database files.
But there are always conversations about this type of thing. Here is a recent one
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/shwmessage.aspx?forumid=5&messageid=276995#bm277376
May 4, 2006 at 6:46 am
I guess I was not clear on my question. The situation is only 3 physical drives in a machine configured with Raid 5 would there be any benifical affects of making 3 or 4 drives letters as apposed to 1.
Thanks
May 4, 2006 at 8:45 am
SCSI, ATA or SATA?
May 4, 2006 at 10:39 am
Just occurred to me you said 3 drives. If you want any kind of fault tolerence you have two options (if supported)
1 RAID 5 - If you want complete fault tolerence)
or
1 No Raid - System/Boot
1 RAID 1 (databases and other files) -- tolerence only on your data.
Either one you loose capcity of 1 whole drive it is a matter of fault tolerence. As for which gives the best performance, in most all cases (ATA, SATA, SCSI) it is the second but again no fault tolerence on the OS. This can vary still however depending on the hardware capabilities.
May 5, 2006 at 9:45 am
always have a seperate os partition, for data recovery's sake.
Even on my desktop I keep data and apps on a seperate partition in case my os goes toasty.
Raid 5 the whole thing and carve up the disk space. If there is only 3 drives in the machine the priority should be on recovery and not performance.
If you want performance, you should have a better server (more drives and array controllers).
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