• I am fairly confident your not getting over 2000 IOPS from 2 disk.

    I have a similar situation as you for my UAT server that is a Dell 510 with a MD1220 DAS and I had to make compromises for this due the budget the organization was willing to spend for UAT. In this case I was able to put in 4 NL storage disk inside the server for space and 6 15K disk for tempdb all Raid10. With 20 disk in the DAS Raid5. Not many writes. Not sure if you have that option to add any disk to the server.

    Not knowing your application. It sounds like you could put this DB into Bulk Logged and save a great deal of logging IO. I would think from what you say there might be heavy usage of tempdb. I tend to agree with you on the first option if you cannot get any more investment except that i would split it into two sets of 8 disk. I would be sure your managers know the risk. Sometimes you just have to do what you can with what you are given to get the job done. If you do have time to test these options that would be the best.

    I don't always test my SQL scripts, but when I do, I test in Production.