dbadvisor,
When I wrote up this article I used our EMC SAN as my reference. Because of the intelligent prefailing of drives in the array I do forget that there are fault tolerances differences between the two.

daletrotman,
This is correct, Windows 2008 does now align the disks at 128 instead of the 63 which Windows 2003 and prior have done. So technically you don't need to change the alignment as with the disk aligned at 128 will have the same performance as 64. But with the other features of diskpart that are so useful when working with a SAN such as extending disks online that it is important to mention it.

MarsonGalvani,
Thank you.

Denny6/9/2009 5:43:11 PM

The description of RAID 10 is not correct. You have described RAID 0+1, striping, then mirroring. RAID 1+0 (often called RAID 10) is mirroring, then striping. These are very different configurations. RAID 1+0 is far more fault tolerant than RAID 0+1.

Lori5/12/2009 7:42:56 PM

Great article. I have one point though. You mentioned using the DISKPART.EXE command-line tool in Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 to align the partition. Is this not a standard feature in Windows Server 2008 and therefore not required? I make this point as we are just building a SAN in our company and do not intend to make this change. Should we still use the DISKPART.EXE tool do you think?

dale5/6/2009 9:30:36 AM

Very good article. Thanks for the tips.

Marcos5/5/2009 10:47:49 AM