Performance Question: RAID or Individual drives ?

I've an NT admin who RAID's everything on every NT box he touches. This is OK for redundancy if the system dies but I'm not sure this is the best option for an Oracle database performance reasons mainly. Are there any tuning guru's out there who could shine a like on the appropriate arguament to use IF it would be better to use individual drives rather than to rely on the RAID set ?

What am I talking about ?:

Standard set-up would be an Oracle server on NT 4 SP3 with system disk a mirrored pair and second 'drive' being a raid set over say 7 to 15 disks. So ORANT is on D:, as is everything else. OK there are different drives and spindles but every read or write to anywhere on the RAID set would use every drive, wouldn't it ? These are 4GB Seagate SCSI drives. The controller is a proper RAID controller, whatever that may be. It's all on Compaq kit.

Thanks,

Dominic Baines Received on Mon Jul 13 1998 - 08:22:39 CDT