[snip] > > Adding drives will not let you get lower response times than the average seek > time on your drives*. But it will let you reach that response time more often. > [snip]
I believe your assertion is fundamentaly flawed. Adding more drives will not let you reach that response time more often. All drives are required to fill every request in all RAID levels (except possibly 0+1, but that isn't used for enterprise applicaitons). Most requests in OLTP require most of the request time to seek, not to read. Only in single large block data transfers will you get any benefit from adding more drives, which is atypical in most database applications. For most database applications, the only way to increase transactions/sec is to decrease request service time, which is generaly achieved with better seek times or a better controller card, or possibly spreading your database accross multiple tablespaces on seperate paritions. My assertion therefore is that simply adding more drives to an already competent* configuration is about as likely to increase your database effectiveness as swiss cheese is to make your car run faster. Alex Turner netEconomist *Assertion here is that the DBA didn't simply configure all tables and xlog on a single 7200 RPM disk, but has seperate physical drives for xlog and tablespace at least on 10k drives. ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly