- Obtaining Maximum Performance While Adding Storage
- Getting the Big Picture
- Detecting Single-Disk Bottlenecks
- Selecting Disk Counters
- Detecting RAID Bottlenecks
- Sizing Additional Disk Capacity for RAID Arrays
- Determining How Many Disks to Add
- Estimating Required Additional RAID Performance Capacity
- Disk Storage Capacity vs. Disk Performance Capacity
- Meeting Your Storage and Performance Needs
Getting the Big Picture
Before you can detect a disk subsystem bottleneck, you need to determine whether your system is suffering from other bottlenecks associated with the CPU, memory, disk, network, applications, clients, and NT resources. (For information about tuning NT to improve performance, see "The Beginner's Guide to Optimizing Windows NT Server," part 1 and part 2, June and August 1997 on my Web site.) If you add resources to an area of NT that isn't throttling your system's performance, you won't improve NT's overall performance. Tuning a resource or purchasing additional hardware only to find that your efforts were in vain can be frustrating. Assuming that your disk subsystem is causing the only bottleneck on your NT system, you can take several steps to detect and correct the bottleneck and to improve your system's disk performance.