asked on

What's the best hard drive configuration for SQL 2005 performance?

I'm building a brand new SQL Server to run Windows Server 2003 Enterprise 64-bit and SQL 2005. It only purpose it to power out installation of Microsoft CRM. The goal is to achieve maximum performance. The server it will run on is a Power Edge 2950. 8(qty) 146 GB 10K SAS drives. 16 BG of RAM and I'll add more if needed. Procs are dual Quad-Core 2.5 GHz bus speed of 1333 MHz and 12 MB L2 cache.

I've been researching the optimal configuration for performance and as you can imagine, I've seen conflicting statements. Can you offer some suggestions? Should the OS be on a RAID 1 with the DB's on a raid 10 and the Logs on a RAID 1? Or should the 8 drives be put in a RAID 10 and just partitioned out? Is 16 GB of RAM enough? Thanks in advance for the input.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Paul Tozer

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

ammexit

ASKER

Right now we have 100 users running on a Dell PowerEdge 2900 with 8 GB of RAM. We have a large amount of slowdown. Its only running SQL 2000, so its being limited to 2 GB. Apparently this is causing the server to use the disks as RAM thus creating the slowdown.

Paul Tozer

I take it you are running CRM 3 and not 4 then. Should be much quicker with SQL 2005. Paging to disk will dramatically slow the system down.

ammexit

ASKER

Yes, CRM 3. Is there a performance improvement in 4?

Paul Tozer

There are improvements, however I would wait until they have released a version fully compatible with SQL 2008