June 10, 2004 at 12:30 am
Hi all,
Can somebody tell me what is the best practice in installung SQL Server 2000 on a RAID 5 configuration server. How do i partition the RAID? Where do i put the data files, log files and backups? I hope to get the best possible set up that would best optimize the server resources, based on experience.
Thanks. Hope to hear from you
here is the configuration of the server:
* Dual processor
*4x72 GB harddrive
*2GB DDR Memory
June 10, 2004 at 5:52 am
You're really kinda in a bind having the 4 drives, ultimately you are going to be wasting 1.
I'm not sure what kind of disk space you are looking to have, but would a RAID 10 config not work better for you?
June 10, 2004 at 7:45 am
RAID 10 should perform better with 4 drives, but it's less space. 2 drives are used to backup the other 2. It's what I'd recomend if you can.
Otherwise use RAID5 with 4 and it doesn't matter how you partition or where you put things.
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June 10, 2004 at 8:25 am
IMHO, there are serious issues for SQL Server with RAID 5. It has the worst sequential write performance (e.g. tran logs) of any RAID configuration, and it's performance in transaction reads is alos quite poor. Moreover, recovery after drive failure is very slow and causes major performance degradation.
With 4 drives, there is, to me anyway, no acceptable config except RAID 10 - fastest and most redundant of all RAID configs.
June 10, 2004 at 9:30 am
Raid 10 is perferred but,
I would run some kind of performance monitor on your server to get a feal for what kind of load reads/writes you are doing to the disk. If you are not doing many writes to the disk I think the Raid 5 would be a more cost effective decission for you. I you are seeing a considerable amount of writes to the disk, than a raid ten will be needed for performance.
June 10, 2004 at 11:19 am
If your system supports RAID 10 config then that would be best as long as you can afford the loss of have the total drive space. With RAID 5 you loose the space equal to 1 drive. If you cannot then one big RAID 5 with everything on it is going to be your only option. But if you can buy two additional of the drives you and have another channel on your controller then make 2 three drive RAID 5 arrays and put logs/tempdb on one while the other is data.
June 11, 2004 at 9:12 am
The first thing you need to do is consider what you're using raid for? Redundancy or speed are your primary concerns.
- if it's speed (highly transactional) use raid 0 (there is no redundancy here though)
- if it's redundancy use 1, cause then everything is there twice (HINT: put your data files on 1 disk and your indexes on the other, then mirror them)
- if you want a little of both use raid 10 (1+0) 2 disks for striping and 2 for mirroring
- if you want more meatier performance than 1 + 0 use raid 5 which will offer you speed (not as fast as raid 1 though) and fair reliability, you will have to consider upgrading your server though.
Max
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