Hi Tony -

The timing of this article is both funny, and informative. I am literally in the process right now of finishing up the design of a new database for my company. We went with similar hardware to a previously configuration of theirs (Dell PowerEdge R710). I beefed it out to spec on the 6-drive bay version (wasn't bad given that there wasn't suppose to be a budget for this project). I loaded it with 6-146gb drives, RAID 5 with a 12mb cache controller, and 8gb of RAM (wanted to start with 16, but cut it back due to going with only the 6-bay drive config).

Now - I had not even heard of this kind of venomous talk about RAID 5 and Databases before. My background has been in I.T. for over 20 years, and RAID 5 was always a very popular and steady platform, for the most part. I'm only newly born to SQL Server (since about 2004 as more of an application analyst), and this is my first titled role as a DBA, but I have to tell you - I would not have gone above RAID 5 for many reasons (not the least of which is the trade off of disk space and the cost for it), but to know that there was all this disparity (no pun intended) over the manner in which the controller writes to the disk is nearly laughable if not questionable. I have never heard of such things being that bad in the past, but then again - I wasn't big on Oracle! 😉

I'll let you know how my first endeavor goes. It's an OLTP system that is being readied for role out next week!

Best wishes to you, and keep the articles coming!

Rich Yarger

St. Louis Park, MN

SQL Server DBA