One of the things we as I.T. consultants have to do on a regular basis is specify the hardware configuration of servers. An important consideration in the process is to decide how many hard drives are necessary, with what level of redundancy, how big to make the partitions, and which programs, data, bits, and bytes should go on which drives. I found a great article by Denny Cherry on this topic that really gives a nice overview of the main considerations for specification of the hard drive attributes of a SQL Server. I was pleased to see that the recomendation for an SQL Server in a small business environement could be accomplished with as few as five physical drives: two in RAID1 configuration for Windows Operating System plus SQL Server program files; and three for data files, log files, and tempdb database in a RAID5 configuration. Several important points are noted in the article including key definitions, a discussion of the trade-offs between recovery time and the risk of a second failure prior to achiving full recovery to redundant operation, and lastly an important recommendation to use DISKPART to manually format partitions to ensure the disks are aligned to 64 blocks...read on...Tips for optimizing disk configuration in SQL Server
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