This would be a recommended mounted volumes for most environment:

  1. 80GB RAID10 C:\ Operating System
  2. 50GB RAID10 D:\ SQL Application (BIN) & System Databases
  3. *100GB RAID10 E:\ User Defined Databases (including related Indexes)
  4. 50GB RAID10 L:\ Transaction Logs
  5. 100GB RAID6 G:\ Backups, Batch Processing, Full Text Catalogs
  6. 50GB RAID6 T:\ TempDB

Reasonings:

  • *User Defined Databases may require more than 100GB; thus, DBA would need to adhere to the build-requirements. Fortunately, volumes can be expanded on-the-fly using scripts or GUI.
  • Each volume would be expandable to support growth
  • User Defined databases should be on a separate volume from the System Databases to simplify backups and restores of those non-system files
  • Although some sources recommended that H:\ be used as the Backup volume, it should be avoided as many environments would map this as the “Home” folder for users
  • RAID10 were known for fast READ I/O with fairly performant WRITE I/O
  • RAID6 READ&WRITE I/O would be slower, yet this would be an effective use of available raw disks capacity while allowing 2 simultaneous disk failures to minimize risks of data loss.
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