Chapter 5 -- IO Subsystem Configuration and Planning

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Chapter 5

When configuring your system, you must take special care to properly design and configure the I/O subsystem. The configuration of the I/O subsystem can either enhance or degrade the performance of your system. By understanding the limitations of the I/O subsystem and configuring your server to function optimally within those limitations, you will help ensure that it will provide the level of performance that you need.

In this chapter, we explore the I/O subsystem. We start with how a hard disk drive works and why it has fundamental performance limits. After learning about disk drives, you will learn about the various RAID solutions that are available to you and their performance characteristics. In addition, you will learn how to identify an I/O performance problem and how to solve that problem. This chapter also presents a number of I/O subsystem tips and recommendations. Finally you will learn how to properly configure Microsoft SQL Server 2000 in order to take advantage of the performance characteristics of your I/O subsystem.