Lies, damned lies, and statistics!   If you have read my three previous posts (1, 2, 3), you may walk away with an impression that on a drive presented from a high-end enterprise class disk array, Windows file fragmentation does not have a significant performance impact. And I’ve given you empirical data—oh yeah, statistics—to support that ...

Too many DBAs tend to view a drive presented from a Storage Area Network (SAN) as something of a monolithic nature. They look at the drive as if it had some intrinsic performance characteristics. This view doesn't help one appreciate the true performance characteristics of such a drive. A more constructive view is to look at the drive as an I/O ...

In Windows Server 2003, you can use the Disk Management console to create a striped volume over multiple dynamic disks (well, you can also create a mirrored, a RAID-5 volume, etc). If these disks (or LUNs) are presented from a SAN, most likely you can stripe across the same storage devices--making up these LUNs--inside the SAN to present ...

RAID 5 is a dirty word in the DBA community and beyond. There are websites devoted to trash RAID 5. I've seen DBAs declaring performance root cause found the very moment they found out that some database files were placed on RAID 5 volumes. You'd be ridiculed and run out of town if you dare to suggest putting the transaction log file on RAID ...