Please recommend a disk configuration for the server

We have a Pentium 200 server box running NT Server 4. It has 512MB of RAM and it's primary function is being an Oracle server. We are currently running 7.3.3 but will be moving to Oracle8 in the very near future.

The server has two FAST+WIDE SCSI adaptec controllers (bus mastering). Controller #1 has two 9GB disks attached to it. Disk 1 is logically partitioned into drive C+D, disk 2 is drive E. Controller #2 also has two 9GB disks attached to it which are mirrors of drive C,D & E. The mirroring is taken care of by Windows NT. There is also a CD-ROM driver attached to controller #1 but the CD is rarely used---only when installing.

We want to change the disk setup so that we end up with two main drives on two different controllers. Objective is to optimize the Oracle's performance by separating tables and indices into tablespaces which exist on two different drives on two different controllers. We have two options: (feel free to add to the list).

1. Add two more controllers to the system (we will end up with total of four controllers then---we don't even know if it's possible) and move two main drives to controller 1&2 and the mirroring disks to controller 3&4. This way each disk has it's own controller and, hopefully, the peformance will go up.
2. Leave the current controllers and add a RAID controller to the server. Move existing drives to the new RAID controller. Say good bye to mirroring and let RAID worry about parallelism and distribution of files accross different drives.

The question: which of the above will yield in maximum performance gain? The cost is an issue as well. If one solution only has about 10-15% advantage on the other, we will rather go with the cheaper one. As it stands right now, #1 (adding two more controllers) is about one third the cost of #2 (RAID).

Thanks for your help!!!

Regards,
Nasir (nnoor_at_cris.com) Received on Sun Oct 04 1998 - 00:00:00 CDT