Thursday, November 6, 2008

Are your Disks Aligned Properly?

I am always on the lookout for new blogs to watch and learn from.  Not long ago, Kevin Kline wrote a very intriguing blog post:

How to Improve Application and Database Performance up to 40% in One Easy Step

I read it, but I didn't get a lot of time to dig into it until recently.  I finally got around to digging into the topic more, and I also spoke to one of our server admin's about it.  Doing some research we found that our entire environment is running on misaligned partitions.  I found an additional resource blog post that has an excellent slide deck on the MSDN blogs by a guy name Jimmy May:

Disk Partition Alignment (Sector Alignment) for SQL Server: Part 1: Slide Deck

I am working on doing some testing of this by rebuilding a disk completely to see how it affects SQLIO benchmarks before and after.  I'll post results later on, but this topic is definitely an interesting subject.

More to come........

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