SQL Server workloads   So far, the discussions in all the previous posts (1, 2, 3, and 4) on the performance impact of file fragmentation on a drive presented from a high-end enterprise-class disk array are related to disk I/O workloads. Ultimately, you want to know how file fragmentation may impact your SQL Server workloads.   In ...

Lies, damned lies, and statistics!   If you have read my three previous posts (1, 2, 3), you may walk away with an impression that on a drive presented from a high-end enterprise class disk array, Windows file fragmentation does not have a significant performance impact. And I’ve given you empirical data—oh yeah, statistics—to support that ...

256KB Sequential Reads   In my two previous posts (1, 2), I highlighted the fact that while file fragmentation had a huge adverse performance impact on directly attached storage (DAS), it did not have much, if any, impact on the drive presented from a high end enterprise class disk array. That observation was derived from running disk I/O ...

1KB Sequential Writes on DAS   There were some questions about the use 1KB sequential writes in my previous post to test the performance impact of file fragmentation on a drive presented from a high end enterprise class disk array.   There were two reasons for testing 1KB sequential writes: ·      SQL ...

1KB Sequential Writes   It’s well known that disk I/O performance can be severely impacted by fragmentation at the file system level. In other words, when a file is allocated space from many small fragments, its performance can be much worse than when its space is allocated from a single contiguous chunk. The impact is most pronounced with ...

Recently, when I was doing some I/O performance tests on an I/O path, I found that 8K random reads (and writes) significantly and consistently outperformed 8K sequential reads (and writes) in terms of I/O throughput (megabytes per second). I was puzzled. With a traditional hard disk that is made up of a stack of magnetic platters held by a ...

In Windows Server 2003, you can use the Disk Management console to create a striped volume over multiple dynamic disks (well, you can also create a mirrored, a RAID-5 volume, etc). If these disks (or LUNs) are presented from a SAN, most likely you can stripe across the same storage devices--making up these LUNs--inside the SAN to present ...

Let’s say you are trying to determine the performance impact of a neat database design change you have just devised on an application. So you run some tests with the existing design and the tests run for several hours. Coming back the next day, you make the change and re-run the same tests. The test results look fantastic. Now, before you ...