Re: Appropriate dirve size for Oracle DB

Mark wrote:
>
> Greetings,
>
> I recently heard that Oracle performs better with smaller drives in a
> RAID set (3 Gig to 9 Gig) and a larger drive size of say 32 Gig for
> each drive is not preferable. Any truth to this? If so, why?

The basic concept here is known as the 'spindle[1] to capacity ratio'. The larger the number of spindles and the smaller the amout of capacity, given sufficient resources to connect said spindles without inducing a bottleneck, will always result in better performance in a RAID 1 or 0+1 configuration while providing an excellent boost in RAID 5 reads.

This is one of those bizarre mysteries to me .. why do HD companies discontinue reasonably-sized drives (4.3G and 9G come to mind) and think "Oh, everyone wants our new 2347TB UltraMegaDrive[tm]! Think of how much they can put on it!". This seems to be a fairly universal (and amazingly stupid) mode of thinking. Other than the A/V industry, I'm having trouble coming up with a real, valid use of these monster drives where they actually benefit any application.

I'd rather see them get creative and do something along the lines of shrinking the case size of the media and putting four 9G drives in the space of one 32G drive. (maybe a micro four-channel sub-controller? :shrug:)

--dsp

[1] the spindle is the cylinder/platter-capture/platter-rotator device perpendicular to the orientation of the platters in your hard disk. the "drive" in "hard drive", if you will. :) Received on Sun Jan 21 2001 - 11:33:05 CST