Best 6 Drive Configuration for SQL Server?

[ehughes100]

I am about to buy and configure a server with 6 18GB SCSI drives and dual CPUs. What would be the optimal configuration to support SQL server under a heavy load (assuming server can handle it)? My current standard is to Mirror the first two drives and put the OS and SQL server install there. Then I Raid 5 the last 4 drives and put the data and log files there. I read that maybe the log files should go on the mirrored set if there is only one. Maybe I am better of with Raid 5 on all 6 drives. If you have any opinions please briefly explain them and why.

 

[Guest_imported]

In our Production environment, we used to do just as you stated. One big drive for the data and log files. On servers that are beefy enough, this is probably adequate. But, in my case as the servers aged a year, and usage increased, the stability of SQL server went down. As a measure to help the stability of the SQL server, we put the log files on a different mirrored drive (seperate from the installation files and the data files). Just doing this minor modification, has saved me probably 50 - 100 hours of work/troubleshooting/outages in the last 9 months. If you can afford to mirror another drive for the logs, I would tell you without any hesitation to do it. I have seen the difference on 3 or 4 different SQL 7.0 servers in our Production environment. Even the underpowered machines from two years ago run with stability under very heavy loads vs. a year ago, that same machine went down every day. It's a simple thing to do to save you many hours of frustration. -JS