Performance Question

[rodrevelation]

Looking into possible enhancements to our current server for performance. Currently, we have a 14 disk array divided up to 2 different drives (10 disks and 4 disks), however, we are wondering if we were to just leave the array as one drive (14 disks) if performance would be better. We are trying to cut down bottlenecks with our database that is housed on that drive and figured having 14 drives would speed up the read/writes on the drives.

Is anyone familiar with this and can confirm whether or not there would be any performance improvements by going with one drive as opposed to two drives?

Thanks

 

[technome]

With the little info provided...

First you may already have scsi bus saturation, depending on your controller speed and hard drive size, and if you have multiple channels or not. If this is a single channel odd are you are saturated. If this is the case you will slow down your array. The new u320 multiple channel array adapters and u320 drives alleviate this, for the present scsi drives sizes available.

Probably the best setup in your case would be to have the "system", and SQL on the 4 disk array, the temp files, log files, and SQL logs set to the 4 disk array. The SQL databases on the 10 disk array. If this is a single channel adapter, I would doubt this would help much.

Then there are the other factors of how much memory you have,CPU speed, whether you have multiple CPUs, how many devices you have installed in the server fighting for CPU time slices, how many users, other programs running etc..