OK Survey Time - Drive Config

[DBAWinnipeg]

Good Morning everyone

Quick survey for ya

I have 2 physical disks on a server and that's all I've got and all I can use.

I need to have my OS, Data, log files on these 2 disks

Can someone give me some educated ideas on "best practice"

OS on 1 disk / Data and Log on another?

OS/Data on 1 disk / Log on another?

Vice Versa?

This is a VERY HIGH number of transactions a minute database (if that helps at all)



Thanks in advance!!!

Colin in da 'Peg

 

[JayKusch]

OK ... The worry here is that if your database or transaction log grows large and it lives on the same disc as the OS, the system disc, it could become a problem and a lot of headaches.

I would advise that you put your OS and the database files, MDFs, on the system disc. Set the Database sizes to as large as you can.

Put you TLog and any backups you may do on the second disc. This helps in performance too since your databases and tlogs are not competing for reads and writes on the same disc.


Thanks

J. Kusch

 

[JayKusch]

The other item I forgot to mention would be to set your Database to auto grow by a small megabyte amount should it need to grow. This will let the DB continue to function until you can figure out what to do next. I would also set an alarm/alert/event notice that would monitor your DBs size and when it came within a thresh hold/water mark, you would be alerted to look at it BEFORE it needed to grow.

It is a standard/best practice to create your Database and TLog sizes to as large as you possibly can set them. This action will give better performance in that if the DB and TLogs were set to a small size, they would have to autogrow thus sometimes causing performance and database issues as the file extends itself. In a high volume shop, as you mention above, this could be very costly in a performance sence.



Thanks

J. Kusch