[dba-Tech] RAID Drives

You should also find out if you have a hardware or software raid.
Hardware is with a SCSI RAID controller card like Adaptec or others.
Software is with the windows OS (= slower).
I supose your still using WNT4? (because your server is old...)
When using a Software RAID you should see all your fysical drives in
WINDISK (diskmanager) and how they are put in RAID.
For example, you could have two disks in RAID 1 for performance reasons,
and three disks in RAID 5 for capacity reasons...
In W2K you can find the disk management in "System Management".

Erwin


-----Original Message-----
From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of William
Hindman
Sent: Saturday, May 08, 2004 6:54 AM
To: Discussion of Hardware and Software issues
Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] RAID Drives

...this can be an incredibly involved question ...basically I'd assume
you're looking at two partitions on a five disk raid array ...but assume
is the key word ...and renders the assumption meaningless since you have
to know for certain :(

...start here
http://www.sql-server-performance.com/rc_hardware_planning.asp

...then come back and ask your questions with a bit more input for the
stupid among us :)

William Hindman
"The world's becoming a museum of socialist failures." John Dos Passos


----- Original Message -----
From: "Arthur Fuller" <artful at rogers.com>
To: "'Discussion of Hardware and Software issues'"
<dba-tech at databaseadvisors.com>
Sent: Friday, May 07, 2004 11:43 PM
Subject: [dba-Tech] RAID Drives


> Can anyone give me a thumbnail education on RAID drives? In my
specific
> case, I have an old server with 5 visible drives in a RAID. From Win
> Explorer I can see 2 drives, C:\ and D:\. I don't think there are any
> hidden drives on the box. Are C:\ and D:\ partitions on these 5
drives?
>
> If I understand RAID correctly (and I freely admit that I'm seriously
> ignorant here), each file-save operation writes one fifth of the data
to
> each drive, plus redundant data (somewhere), so that if any given
drive
> goes down, the data on it is also elsewhere, enabling me to replace
said
> drive without even powering down. Is that part correct, at least?
>
> Now for the serious question. Accepted wisdom says that the optimal
SQL
> installation puts the data on one drive and the indexes on another,
with
> (if possible) SQL itself on a third drive.
>
> Is this correct? Given a RAID setup as described above, how would I do
> this? Should I reformat the RAID and create several drives? If I did
> that, then I could easily move the indexes to some other drive, but am
I
> actually gaining something by doing this? Or is this all hocus-pocus
> along the lines of multiple partitions on one hard disk?
>
> Remember, as you read this, that there are no stupid questions -- only
> stupid people :)
>
> Arthur
>
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> dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com
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