I'm building a SQL Server with 48 GB RAM, 1 CPU, & 8 SATA III (6GB/s) SSD drives (128 GB Crucial m4) and an LSI MegaRAID controller (SAS 9265-8i). I expect the typical work load to be mostly reads. There will be some periods of heavier write activity (hourly data syncs w/ 3rd party data providers - nightly backups), but the I suspect the typical read/write ratio is about 90% reads/10% writes.
Option 1:
Logical Drive C: - RAID 1 (2 physical drives) - OS
Logical Drive D: - RAID 10 (6 physical drives) - DB files/logs/tempdb/backups?
OR
Option 2:
Logical Drive C: - RAID 1 (2 physical drives) - OS
Logical Drive D: - RAID 1 (2 physical drives) - Db Files
Logical Drive E: - RAID 1 (2 physical drives) - log files/backups?
Logical Drive F: - RAID 1 (2 physical drives) - tempdb
OR
Option 3:
Other suggestions?
I'm thinking option 1 would give me better performance, since all DB activity would be striped across 3 drives (and mirrored across the other 3 in the array), although option 2 seems to mimic conventional wisdom (which appears to apply more to mechanical drives than SSDs). It seems like Stack Overflow has gone with option 1.
I'm guessing with SSD's it's OK to put every thing on a single logical drive since your server is probably more CPU constrained instead of I/O constrained at that point?
Another question I have is where should I place the nightly backups? We don't want backups slowing down the rest of SQL server, and I'm guessing writing the backups the same location as the logs is a good practice because the read/write behavior in both those cases is sequential writes.