Re: Best practice - disks/RAID

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High Utilization is relative so it is hard to give you an exact answer. Are you talking about 100 trans a sec or 10,000 a sec? Will it be large transactions or small ones? If all you can have is 8 drives then you are limited in what you can support. You can usually get by with a Raid 1 for the OS and potentially place the transaction logs (including Tempdb) on there as well, just no data files. You can then have a 6 disk Raid 10 for the user and tempdb data files. Another choice is to have a 4 disk Raid 10 for the user data and a Raid 1 for tempdb data files. But it all depend son your app and how you use the data. You should test each way to see what works best under your actual load.

--
Andrew J. Kelly SQL MVP
Solid Quality Mentors


"weaverbeaver" <weaverbeaver@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:BB0D775C-07F1-4115-930D-26EB2B309B2F@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I am looking to order hardware for a new SQL server to run SQL 2005 for a
high utilisation database (lots of database writes). We don't have a SAN so I
was looking to spec a server with 8 15k SAS drives configured as RAID 10 as
all docs seem to point to this as providing the best performance (I am
limited to 8 disks for the corporate choice of server). My question relates
to other articles which say transaction logs should be on a dedicated disk,
tempdb should be on a dedicated disk if highly utilised (which this is). Then
there is the best practice of having the OS on a seperate mirrored pair for
resillience. I am quickly running out of physical disks to use RAID10 which
is wasteful in terms of disks.

For best performance, Should I go down the raid10 route and have everything
on the same RAID volume (allbeit partitioned) or am I better off moving away
from RAID 10 in favour of seperating the OS, transaction logs and database,
tempdb etc?

I appreciate this may be dependant on many factors but any advice would be
much appreciated

regards

Karl

.

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