PARTITIONING DISKS

Hi all,
What is the best way to partitioning disks for performance in sql server
2000?
whe have 4 disks of 70 GB, and we want to use RAID-10, so we have 280GB of
free space.
What's the best way to partitioning this disks on windows 2003?
Thanks in Advance,
Fabio
First off if you only have 4 disks and you are using Raid 10 you will only
get 140GB of usable space. A Raid10 is a stripe of mirrored disks so you
would loose half the capacity storage wise. Partitioning a single drive
array does nothing for performance. It gives you the illusion that you have
multiple drives when in fact they are only logical in nature and all the
activity is still happening on a single drive array. It has an added down
side that now if you create several partitions and you need more space you
in one of them you may be in a bind. If you only have a single drive array
I recommend you place a single partition on it for maximum usability. Just
be sure to create seperate folders to logically divide your data etc from
your other files.
Andrew J. Kelly SQL MVP
"Fabio" <fabio@.glb.com.br> wrote in message
news:OT4z$HX%23EHA.3756@.TK2MSFTNGP14.phx.gbl...
> Hi all,
> What is the best way to partitioning disks for performance in sql server
> 2000?
> whe have 4 disks of 70 GB, and we want to use RAID-10, so we have 280GB of
> free space.
> What's the best way to partitioning this disks on windows 2003?
> Thanks in Advance,
> Fabio
>
|||Does the server come with only 4 disk capacity? Where are you planning to
install OS and SQL program files on?
In this case, you are limited. You can only build two RAID 1 mirror sets
with 70 GB maximum space for each. You definitely want to separate data and
log files on different physical arrays. Your best bet is to put logs on the
OS array and data files on separate array. Neither configuration is a good
design but if your database isn't highly resource demanding, you may get
away with it.
Richard
"Fabio" <fabio@.glb.com.br> wrote in message
news:OT4z$HX%23EHA.3756@.TK2MSFTNGP14.phx.gbl...
> Hi all,
> What is the best way to partitioning disks for performance in sql server
> 2000?
> whe have 4 disks of 70 GB, and we want to use RAID-10, so we have 280GB of
> free space.
> What's the best way to partitioning this disks on windows 2003?
> Thanks in Advance,
> Fabio
>
|||Fabio wrote:
> Hi all,
> What is the best way to partitioning disks for performance in sql
> server 2000?
> whe have 4 disks of 70 GB, and we want to use RAID-10, so we have
> 280GB of free space.
> What's the best way to partitioning this disks on windows 2003?
> Thanks in Advance,
> Fabio
We don't know your requirements or database sizes, but as Andrew
mentioned you'll lose half your drive space using any mirrored RAID
configuration. I might suggest the following. If this is a small/medium
database, you can do the following:
- Add a fifth drive
- Create a mirrored partition using two of the drives and install the
OS, SQL Server files, tempdb, and the transaction logs there (this is
your C drive). Use hardware mirroring, not software.
- Create a RAID 5 array using the three remaining disks (140GB usable).
RAID 5 has good read performance, but low write performance. For
anything but large systems, the throughput should be more than adequate.
If you let us know more about your requirements, we may be able to offer
alternative solutions.
David Gugick
Imceda Software
www.imceda.com