If you’re buying a standard package your vendor should know this.
Surprisingly however in the hardware proposal (top end server(s) / high rpm disks right?) this figure isn’t mentioned anywhere in most situations.
What you can do, is ask your vendor if they could run a fn_virualfilestats() function (see my fn_virtualfilestats post) on a similar production configuration of another customer (better: talk to them yourself!) . This gives you insight on the I/O pattern (more read of more write activity) and the load on TempDB, to determine if it’s a good candidate –which it usually is- to store on it’s own disk spindles.
Run the Microsoft SQLIO tool to determine a baseline on MB/s and latency per disk partition.
Store it for later reference, the Windows performance tool can also measure the throughput and it gives you the possibility to compare the numbers and check if there might be a disk throughput performance bottleneck in your production system.
Disk configuration tips:
Use as many disk spindles as you can, and try spreading data / log and tempdb on different raid arrays.
Stripe your RAID-config at 256k instead of 64k / 128k.This will increase performance of SQL Server read-aheads.
If you use Windows 2000 / 2003 align the disk partitions!!!:
(see Miscrosoft knowledge base article KB300415 on how to use Diskpart).
At the Diskpart command prompt,
type: Create Partition Primary Align=X,
where X is either 32 or 64, depending on the recommendation from your storage vendor.
If your storage vendor does not have any specific recommendations, it is recommended that
you use 64.
This step is not needed in Windows 2008
Full (not quick) format with a 64kb stripe size for disks holding data/log and backup files.
Full (not quick) format with a 4kb stripe size for OS and program/swap devices
Data raid5 or raid10 when there’s more write then read activity (check with fn_virualfilestats),
Log (raid1 or raid10 under heavy load), separate backup disk (raid5)
Put TempDB on its own physical disks (raid1, raid10 under heavy load).
In a non-clustered environment, I normally use the local server storage for TempDB.
>
Use NTFS volumes
Do not use more then 80% of the volume
Defragment the disks on a regular basis
