SQL Server configuration disk layout - best practices from field
Configuration of server such as disk and memory is an important factor for SQL Server Performance, there is all about questions within newsgroups and forums that how do I setup the disk layout for a SQL Server database (say, 2005 version). Not only this there will be more questions asked related to general guidelines or any other setup within the environment.
For the discussion sake let us assume the hardwar setup would be on SAN with the storage of 5 RAID 10 LUNs having seperate spindles, the usual setup would be D: drive for TEMPDB, E: for data files & F: for transaction log files. Further you should consider the CPU & Memory configuration, from those links. So going deep into the configuration of disk layous, important factor is size of the transaction logs such as setting them up with optimum values and not to leave with default AUTOGROW settings, and not to mention about RECOVERY model (FULL is recommended for point in time recovery). Not only that when it comes to the disks the backups are very important, such as the schedule and completion of tasks, having enough disk space for additional backups (if in case required).
Since the SQL Server 2005 started the TEMPDB will have priority in using any process on SQL Server, so in this case you must set a proper values and think about potential contention issues that are referred in this Technet WorkingWithTempdb article. Also the usual practice of creating multiple files for the user database is not required for the database sizes (nominal) near about 500 to 700 GB. This is applicable for the log files configuration too, do not create or think about multiple log files for performance, as they are not going help being the reason for sequential access and as usual better to keep the TEMPDB on the RAID 10 where you are going to put up the transaction log files. Not only to the disk configuration or server resources allocation you should refer to the other important tasks such as database maintenance practices and optimizing the database for better performance, refer to the links below:
SQL2005-IndexOptimization-BestPractices
Further to the above I have found the following links as 'useful' for the disk alignment purpose: http://seepia.dyndns.org/~pojanisu/diskalignment/diskalignment.html & http://seepia.dyndns.org/~pojanisu/tempdb/tempdb.html
Don't assume that setting up SQL Server on SAN or high resource server will be good enough to attain performance, the above factors are very important to keepup the performance.