Getting Started
System Configuration and Resource Planning
Disk Structure: Spindles, RAID, Plaid, Layout, Cache
How to resolve the disparity? How do you plan a decent layout of fragments and tables in a 70GB database when two mirrored pairs of 36GB drives will give you that much storage, and the safety you want, but not the performance you need? Total cost $2040.
Answer: Get 18 9GB drives, build 9 mirrored pairs. Then stripe 8 pairs with a 16K block size into a single 72GB RAID10 array, use the remaining mirrored pair for rootdb, logical and physical logs, and sort-work/tempdb space. Partition the array into 36 2GB chunks plus a few 2GB chunks from the single mirrored pair. Plenty of space and 8 times the IO bandwidth for chunk writes and read ahead. Total cost $3700 w/ Quantum Atlas 10K-II drives. Cost difference $1660.