• I suspect that largely whatever settings you choose will make little difference. Raid level, disk rotational speed and cache settings are more likely to have an impact.

    The config on disks only applies for physical io, hopefully most of your requests will be met from buffer cache, so physical io relates to backups, t-log backups, checkpoints and maybe tempdb ( depending on your database/applications )

    I did do some tests and wasn't ever able to measure differences in disk formats - raid,spindle speed and spindle count for sure. I usually format backup and t-log drives 64kb , I still tend to make data drives 8kb. stripe size I usually set to at least 256kb. I have seen ( in the past significant gains from switching off read ahead and making all controller cache 100% write - but it's more and more difficult to override storage settings these days. )

    [font="Comic Sans MS"]The GrumpyOldDBA[/font]
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