John W. Colby
jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Sun May 16 10:16:20 CDT 2004
I tried but failed to find the article. In the magazine I guess. John W. Colby www.ColbyConsulting.com -----Original Message----- From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com]On Behalf Of Mitsules, Mark S. (Newport News) Sent: Friday, May 14, 2004 3:47 PM To: 'Discussion of Hardware and Software issues' Subject: RE: [dba-Tech] RAID Drives FYI...if you are still looking for info. MaximumPC just did an article on RAID setups and reported that the optimal RAID consisted of 3 drives. Any more than that and you are surpassing the bandwidth capabilities of the PCI bus. As a fourth drive is added you actually lose performance due to overhead. Granted, these tests were done on the newest hardware available so YMMV. Perhaps if you are using 5 slower 5400 RPM drives it isn't an issue. Mark -----Original Message----- From: Arthur Fuller [mailto:artful at rogers.com] Sent: Friday, May 07, 2004 11:43 PM To: 'Discussion of Hardware and Software issues' 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 _______________________________________________ dba-Tech mailing list dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com _______________________________________________ dba-Tech mailing list dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com