Recent content by Copie

I'm lead to believe that a static page file is better for performance as there is less disk thrashing due to resizing. Although if the page file is on a dedicated disk thats less of an issue. We tend to leave our page files on the OS drive though.

It's a fair point but why have such a large swap if it's not actually needed?

I've never managed to find a sensible answer to the question of "how large should your swap file be" despite looking every 6 months for what seems the last 10 years. In the good old days it was recommended that your swap file should be 1.5x your RAM size. But with RAM becoming cheaper and...

Thanks for your comments on the Fusion IO device, I agree with some of your points and whilst I believe this is an immature technology, I think the idea has a lot of legs in the future. Regarding that the 8 spindle RAID10 is the fastest setup in your example, where is the point of deminishing...

I did see that product but have not seen enough reviews to convince me, but it's a serious contender, especially when we take into account rack space / AC / power etc

Whilst I agree with you, you would be supprised at how distorted some management views these things. It would cost say $60k for a dba / developer for an entire year to tune a database. It would cost say $100k for a much faster storage subsystem. Management see the years developer time in...

I appreciate that it's like asking "what car should I buy and what colour?" What if I changed my question to read instead: "What is the fastest storage system I could buy for a 1Tb SQL server database with 50/50 concurrent reads/writes for $50k, $75k, $100k. Assume i'm using a Dell R710 with...

Thank you for the link, i'll read through that doc it looks interesting We are using 2x SAS 5/e cards in our servers Thanks for your detailed reply(s), I wont pretend I understand everything as i'm not a storage expert but it looks like even with "out of the box" performance I'm already...

Thanks for your replies Would increasing the number of controllers (i.e. using two MD3000's instead of 1) help then? Although this isn't a supported configuration. Zero DB tuning has been done, at the moment i'm at the point where DBA / developer time is more expensive than hardware. When...

Hi Geiger, thanks for your swift reply! In answer to your questions: 1) Yes, would you consider 200MB/s fast or slow for this number of spindles? 2) Would 10x 4 spindle RAID10's be faster than a single 30 drive RAID10 array? 3) I like the CX4 but they are exceptionally expensive compared...

Hi Folks, i'm looking for some advice. We have a few servers that are utilising Dell MD3000 RAID arrays (with 2x MD1000 expansion for a total of 45 drives) for use with SQL server databases. We do a lot of simultainous reading and writing so use 15K 146Gb SAS drives. We are finding that...