Building optimal custom machine for Sql Server / Admins
This question and answers originated from serverfault.com
Question asked Chad Grant
Dave Cheney
Best practice says that your OS and swap should not share a lun with anything else. However I would be more concerned about using a RAID 0 lun for tempDB. Is it really worth trading off the write performance of RAID 1 for the risk of a disk failure?
unknown author
How about set all 6 disks in one RAID 10 and set one partition for the OS and another (1 or 2) for data ? Given that you would avoid heavy usage of swap by add plenty of RAM into the machine ?
ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells
You should have an array for logs and an array for data/tempdb, plus a separate set of system disks.
On a system this small you probably only need a single mirrored par for the logs. Use one mirrored pair for system disks, one for logs and the rest for a RAID-10 where tempdb and data volumes go.
If (for some reason) you need to mix RAID-5 volumes into the system you are probably better off with tempdb on a separate RAID-10 if there is a lot of traffic on it. However, the adaptec RAID controller you have will probably let you set up different RAID configurations on different partitions of the disk. The 2200s controllers I'm using on some SQL server dev boxes will do this, and I believe most recent Adaptec controllers will it as well. In this case you could set up both a RAID-5 and RAID-10 on different partitions of the same disks.
Answers (3)