Spreading/Spann SQL DB across multiple drives

SQL Server Administration
1

Hi,

Could you please share your guidance on the following SQL exercise?

Objective: Using SQL Server 2014 Enterprise Edition, I plan to implement a 17TB db on a single Windows Server 2012, over 5 drives 4TB each.

Challenge: As far as I can tell, in order to spread the db over several drives, I have the following two options;

1)Use the Windows OS Spanned Volume functionality, essentially the OS layer reports the 5 - 4TB drives as a single drive 20TB drive to applications such as SQL server

-Or-

2)Use the SQL's 2014 FILEGROUP functionality, thus, assigning tables or indexes to different FILEGROUPs and then placing the files for those FILEGROUPs on different physical drives

Which of the above options would you recommend? are there other Windows & MS SQL options to reach the objective?

Regards,

-r

2

No replies? I guess all of the experts are gone, right?

3

If all you have are 5 drives - and they are not setup in any type of RAID array - you are going to run into a lot of problems with this setup and configuration.

You have a third option - you can add files to a single filegroup where each file is on a separate drive. SQL will manage the data across the files.

4

Thank you for the guidance Jeffw8713