what is the need for placing mdf and ldf files in different drives

  • Is there any special reason for placing these files in separate disks.

  • It can help with speed by reducing waits based on IO.

    Im sure someone will correct me if im wrong.

  • If you put those on the same disk, there can be read/write I/O contention. If you seperate them, you remove this I/O bottleneck and performance will go up.

    Also, if one of the disks crashes, you don't lose everything.

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    MCSE Business Intelligence - Microsoft Data Platform MVP

  • Koen Verbeeck (2/1/2013)


    Also, if one of the disks crashes, you don't lose everything.

    That's not entirely true.

    If you have separate data and log drives and no backups and the data drive becomes lost\corrupt\formatted\etc you will lose your data. The logs alone are not going to recover data.

    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    "Ya can't make an omelette without breaking just a few eggs" 😉

  • Perry Whittle (2/1/2013)


    Koen Verbeeck (2/1/2013)


    Also, if one of the disks crashes, you don't lose everything.

    That's not entirely true.

    If you have separate data and log drives and no backups and the data drive becomes lost\corrupt\formatted\etc you will lose your data. The logs alone are not going to recover data.

    You're right 🙂 I knew when I was typing that sentence it was too short to say exactly what I had in my head.

    What I was trying to say was: if you have both files on one disk and it crashes, you have to rely on your backups to restore everything. But if only the data disk crashes, you can still perform a tail log backup and perhaps do a point-in-time restore.

    Need an answer? No, you need a question
    My blog at https://sqlkover.com.
    MCSE Business Intelligence - Microsoft Data Platform MVP

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