Partitioning RAID5

[MagnumVP]

I have 70GB to work with for the entire system.

I have (3) 36GB HD (RAID 5). How should I parition it?

I figure the OS needs about 10GB (Windows 2003 Server and SQL 2000 Server)

Should I create 2 other partitions? One for the Logs and the other for the DB?

I'm thinking 50GB for the DB and 10GB for the Logs. The system will be backed up Daily.

Any thoughts?

 

[jgoodman00]

In terms of performance, the partioning is going to make little difference. Infact it will probably have a negative effect on performance:

Because you have a single raid array, you will be partitioning blocks to different drives. If you then place the OS on one partition, the DB on another partition, & the LOG on another partition, the reads/writes will have to read three seperate, non-consecutive sections of the disk, in a similar way to a fragmented single partition.

Partitioning this way will, however, make management easier, as each 'entity' will have its own drive.

Could you not install a standard disk, & install the OS to this?

You would then ideally want a seperate array for the DB & LOG files, but depending on use placing them on the same array might well suffice.

The type of activity (OLAP or OLTP) will also affect your requirements. OLTP will require faster disk arrays, because you will need to write data. If the primary function is OLAP, then a server with lots of memory could suffice. After the initial slowness, most of the data could be held in RAM & served very rapidly...

James Goodman MCSE, MCDBA

http://www.angelfire.com/sports/f1pictures

 

[MagnumVP]

Thank you for your advice. I think I will take it in part and just make a 10Gb partition for the System and Boot and the rest for the DB and Logs

Thanks