Optimal RAID setup for SQL server

Question

We have an SQL 2005 database backend for our website, currently about 10GB in size. There are a lot more reads than writes, though I don\'t have the exact statistics.

We

Answer 1

Be aware that the key performance metric will be the seek rate, not the data rate. That is, a typical database that is disk-bound (as yours may become as it grows) will be limited by how many IOs per second the disks can support, rather than the maximum data rate they can support for sequential reads.

This means that if you're wondering how to use 4 disks (for example), two RAID1 pairs should give you better performance than one 4-disk RAID5 array. Of course, you won't get as much usable storage out of the two RAID1 pairs.