We're about to hardware upgrade our exisiting Sql 2008 Server. So, I'm checking out some best practices with regards to hardware, like .. RAID levels for the HD and making sure the TempDB is on a different disk than the DB's, etc.
I then stumbled onto these two posts here and here. They chat about making sure our Windows 2008 servers have the correct partition offset size.
I'm a bit confussed after I read those posts. They mention in various places that..
Windows Server 2008 aligns partitions by default.
So, if i wish to have partition sizes of 64K, Do i need to worry about this? Remember, I'll be doing a fresh install of Windows Server 2008 …. and I can't remember seeing any option during the install, when we partition disks, for partition alignments/sizes.
Can anyone shed some light, in layman's terms, please?
**Note: i'm not talking about C:\ == 50Gig size, D:\ == xxxGig, etc. Not that type of partitioning.
Best Answer
Ok - to make this clear...
If you are creating volumes on Windows Server 2008, you do not need to be concerned about the volume's partition offset because Windows Server 2008 will automatically set is to 1MB, which is a multiple of the common RAID stripe sizes and NTFS allocation unit sizes (both of which you should usually have set to 64K, unless you I/O subsystem won't let you go below 128K for the RAID stripe size - which is fine). In your question, you mention partition size, and what you're actually talking about is the NTFS allocation unit size (default 4K).
If you are installing a new Windows 2008 Server and then attaching volumes to it that were actually created using Windows Server 2003 or before, then unless you have previously used diskpart to change the partition offset from the default of 32.5K (63 x 512byte disk blocks), you must manually change it with diskpart, or recreate the volume.
My preference would be to backup your databases and then restore them on newly created volumes.
Hope this helps!
PS My blog post that you reference talks about having the correct partition offset, not partition size. And the whitepaper link in the first answer is the same one that I reference in the blog post you've already read.