Disk recommendations

  • I am in the design phase for a database that is presently 10 gb of data and is projected the data will increase by 100% by the end of next year.

    In addition to the data we will be adding images to the database at a rate of approximately 640 mg per day.

    My recommendations are for 4 filegroups in this configuration:

    Data volume raid 10

    Index volume raid 5

    Images only raid 10 (SQL Server supports this nicely with the TEXTIMAGE_ON directive)

    Transaction log

    I would love to hear everyone thoughts on this as well as suggestions for specific hardware (SAN or NAS)?

    If you had the following unit, either in iSCSI or direct attached SCSI (faster) how would you configure it? If this unit isn’t an ideal fit do you have any suggestions?

    http://www.promise.com/marketing/datasheet/file/1_VT%20M500i%20DS.pdf

  • Depending on the log volume, RAID 1 or 10 for that.

    I'm not sure it's worth separating out the indexes from data for 10GB, or even 100GB. Depends on your query patterns. Where do clustered indexes go? with the data (it is the data)

    The images being separated out is interesting. If you can test this under a load and provide some data on image size and perf differences, I think this would be great data to have.

    Can you disclose what type of application this is?

    Sorry, no iSCSI or much SAN experience.

  • Chris, I personally do not like storing images in the database. I prefer to store them on a separate image server and only store pointers to the images in the database.

    For the log files, I definitely prefer RAID 10 over RAID 1. Striped disks are faster.

    My suggestion would be:

    Drive 1: System files, OS, etc. RAID 1

    Drive 2: System db files data and log, RAID 10

    Drive 2.5: If heavy load is going to be placed on tempdb, on its own drive, RAID 10, 1 filegroup per processor

    Drive 3: Non-system data files RAID 10

    Drive 4: Non-system log files RAID 10

    Drive 5 or separate server: Images, not in the database

    Drive 1 & 2 could be condensed to a single RAID 10 drive.

    SAN's are great. Not a big fan of using NAS.


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