Drive configuration for 5 large databases

Posted by Mr. Flibble on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Mr. Flibble
Published on 2010-04-27T23:46:57Z Indexed on 2010/04/27 23:53 UTC
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sql-server

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raid

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raid5

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server-configuration

I've got 5 databases, each 300GB, currently on a RAID 5 array consisting of 5 drives. All the databases are used heavily, at the same time, so drive speed is an issue.

Would I see better performance if I got rid of the RAID 5 configuration and just put each database on a separate drive? The redundancy provided by RAID 5 is not necessary due to mirroring elsewhere.

Will the server then be able to perform reads / writes to different databases drives in parallel? More so at least than when it's in RAID?

This is all on Windows 2003 / SQL 2008.

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