Well, it was released a year ago but I only just found out about it last week. The SQL CAT team published a whitepaper last year called Database Snapshot Performance Considerations under I/O-Intensive Workloads. For a variety of workloads and with different numbers of concurrent database snapshots, it covers:
- How much time does it take to create a database snapshot?
- Transaction and I/O patterns during database snapshot creation
- Transaction throughput and response time with multiple database snapshots
- Impact of database snapshot on index creation
- Restoring the source database from a database snapshot
- Recommendations
Check it out at http://download.microsoft.com/download/d/9/4/d948f981-926e-40fa-a026-5bfcf076d9b9/DBSnapshotPerf.docx