Not at all.  Usually dbs perform better with more drives (more spindles really).

You don't need to move it to another table to get it out of the main data area.  Just tell SQL to force all max column(s) out of row (this...

Not for data, that should be OK.

I'd say do not compress log files using Windows or anything external to SQL Server.

Use method two.  You could also use a view or a cte to define the SUMs to use in other calcs.

Best would be to use a bigint SEQUENCE object and get rid of the guids completely.  The app can still pre-set the values as it did for guids, which was...

When SQL decides it's necessary to fit the row into the page.  There's no way to...

Yep, that's not gonna work, SQL needs the sort column in the data.  Here's one workaround:

SELECT MONTH, Attendance
FROM (
  SELECT
  DATENAME (MONTH, [Date]) AS...

A) Yeah ... I've worked with date shifting a lot 🙂
C) Yes, we strive for performance here quite a bit.  The "DATEADD" technique is only math, not text, so...

Don't have any usable test data, but this should be close at least.  [Btw, overlaying the day name was trivial, so I didn't include that.]

UPDATE...

Typically the best way to get great response time for such queries is to cluster the lookup table on the lookup keys.
Unfortunately, when the primary lookup key is a...

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[ServSP_AuditAllTables_test]
AS

SET NOCOUNT ON;

INSERT INTO dbo.audit_table ( TableName, NumberOfRecords, Date )
SELECT ATL.TableName, CA1.row_count, GETDATE() AS date
FROM AllTablesList ATL