Hard Disk Configuration

When asked where hardware dollars are best spent, I always recommend a great disk subsystem.

Hard drives are often the source of performance bottlenecks. Any dime spent on a high-performing hard drives will not go to waste.

Disks are also the component that will most likely fail. Matt, the Microsoft blogger, claims that disks have a failure rate of 2% per year per disk. If that's the case, then an investment in RAID arrays would be very wise.

As far as specific drive components go, it's difficult to make a recommendation without knowing the purpose of the SQL Server.

Here's Matt's post:

http://blogs.msdn.com/matt_hollingsworth/archive/2007/04/02/mtbf-is-useless-how-to-decide-when-to-use-raid-for-database-high-availability.aspx