RAID And You (A Guide To RAID-0/1/5/6/xx)

[stevecs]

Ok, Kind of tied into the previous post concerning raid's (and I'll probably merge them) but ran into a problem late last night/early this morning at work and needed to come up with a fast workload analysis for some windows boxes. Threw this together which uses the output of microsoft's diskmon utility (used to be sysinternals) at: (works /w nt4, 2000, 2003, xp, 32 & 64bit (haven't tried vista but may work with that as well).

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb896646.aspx

spread sheet takes the output from this utility and does the math to display what your workload is. (random/sequential/average request size & response times et al). Anyway, can be used to get an idea as to what you want to do for your storage and for raids. (ie, if have more of a random workload and a majority of writes, parity raid 3/4/5/6 shouldn't be used, look toward non parity raids et al. You can use the above spreadsheet in #post 52 to determine what raids work best with your workload).

Figured no sense in wasting it and someone may find it useful here as well.