Question : Spindle (Disk) Configuration for Oracle 9i

Hello...
I'd like to know if anyone has a recommended spindle (disk) configuration when installing and setting up Oracle 9i. We currently have an Oracle 9i environment with two 8GB databases and are migrating to new hardware with SAN storage. I hear that it is better to separate out logs, backup files, and database files on separate disks (mirrored) to increase I/O and performance. Is there any recommendation on how to go about planning this?   We currently just have our Oracle environment on one big (Raid 5) (oracle software installation and datafiles).

Thx!
Ken

Answer : Spindle (Disk) Configuration for Oracle 9i

You already have a long answer from Metanil, here's my much shorter response.  Yes, traditionally Oracle has performed better when the various parts of the database (data tablespaces, index tablespaces, rollback/undo tablespaces, temp tablespaces, on-line and archived redo logs, backups, etc.) were each on separate spindles.  Also, RAID5 was not best for many of them, especially: temp tablespaces, rollback/undo, redo logs and backups.  As disk drives have gotten larger, the likelihood of having the luxury of separate spindles for each of these components especially with just a moderately-sized (8GB) database, is very slim.  And when you add a SAN to the mix, with the larger read/write cache that SAN's typically have, that also changes things and reduces the advantages of separate spindles.

We recently moved our 25GB database from multiple, separate local disks (some RAID1 and some RAID5) to a SAN.  We tested both RAID1 and RAID5 on the SAN, and could find no penalty for RAID5 (at least with the tests that we thought to try) so we have all RAID5 devices for our SAN-based database now.  We do have enough disks in our SAN to have a few separate RAID5 volumns, so we can split up our database files a bit, but we get good performance from our hardware even without having enough separate volumns/spindles to have all of the parts of the database separated from each other.