Whitepaper on Predeployment I/O Best Practices, plus a few urban legends around SQL Server IO

There’s a new whitepaper on TechNet that I’ve just come across (even though it was published 6 months ago!) called Predeployment I/O Best Practices. It’s really good – discussing the following:

Guidelines for determining I/O capacity
Disk configuration best practices and common pitfalls
Using SQLIO to determine capacity and interpreting its results
Using System Monitor to monitor an IO subsystem

You can read it here and I’ve added a link to our whitepapers page.

While I’m on the subject of I/O, Bob Dorr (A Senior Escalation Engineer in PSS) published a blog post last year that debunks a couple of urban legends around SQL Server’s IO, specifically:

The myth that SQL Server used one thread per data file
The myth that a disk queue length greater than 2 indicates an I/O bottleneck

Check out his blog post and the subsequent discussion here.

Posted Under:

IO Subsystems, Performance Tuning, Tools

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