Hi, i'm installing SQL 2K5 on Win2K3 R2 and i configure my Array like this Mirror - For - OS + SQL binaries Mirror - For - TLog Raid5 - For - DB's my question is about the stripe size that i can choose when configuring the mirror and raid first question, what is stripe size exactly, second ,what stripe size should i use in the configuration above? Thx
Hi, Here's an quote from one of Microsoft's white-papers about storage design for SQL2k5, and should answer your questions: Sector Size vs. Stripe Size The sector size is the smallest physical storage unit on the disk. The sector size is a fixed size set by the disk manufacturer, currently at 512 bytes. The stripe size refers to the unit of data that is written and accessed from a disk in a RAID system. This is a configurable value that is set when designing the storage array system. A smaller stripe size allows data to be distributed to more disks and increase I/O parallelism. Note that the stripe size of a single SQL Server extent (64 KB) is the lower limit. For the same data, a larger stripe size means the data can be stored on fewer disks and decrease the I/O distribution and the degree of parallelism. We recommend a 64 KB or 256 KB stripe size for most workloads. When the workload includes table and index range scans on tables that are larger than 100 MB, a stripe size of 256 KB allows for more efficient read-ahead.