Still looking for RAID answers

I know that there has been much discussion of RAID recently in this newsgroup. I hope to get a bit more advice from anyone who has experience to offer.

Several years ago, when I first become involved in Oracle administration, I read much about the virtues of OFA. OFA proponents, and the Oracle DBA Handbook strongly stated the importance of getting the various Oracle objects onto different physical disk drives. More recently, at the suggestion of several in this newsgroup, I've read about SAME (Stripe All, Mirror Everything). It seems that the two are rather differing approaches, though both generally urge the inclusion of as many physical disk drives as possible. Both make it clear that RAID based on parity (RAID 3 - 5) are undesirable. In simple terms, I suppose, we used to say that striping was bad, now we say that only parity striping is bad.

Because of a recent hardware failure, I am now in a position to completely reconfigure my StorEdge array on a Sun server, running Solaris 8. I plan to use 10 drives, keeping the other 2 for hot spares. If I consider OFA recommendations, I would keep all of the drives as RAID 1 (mirrored) pairs, with each pair, its own filesystem. SAME would have me use RAID 0+1, creating a single slice of all 10 drives.

It is still not clear to me, is the SAME architecture approach (RAID 0+1) "better" than OFA (RAID 1), "just as good", or "almost as good" for Oracle performance? Received on Tue Jan 04 2005 - 13:19:58 CST