From the Vantage guide:
System Drive Configuration
The number of drives you purchase and how you decide to configure them is dependant on your budget, the intensity of your transactions, desired performance and need for fault tolerance. Budget will determine the # and speed of the disks you can afford. Intensity of transactions will predict what disk capacity your will need. Desired performance and fault tolerance will point you in the direction of some sort of RAID solution.
The major components of a Vantage system are:
1) Operating system
2) Vantage application code
3) Progress database files (D1, D2, LG?)
4) Progress Before Image (BI) file
In an ideal system, every one of these items would have its own disk, with the database files being located on a RAID10 set and BI files being mirrored for maximum performance and integrity. Given fewer disks, combining them involves some trade offs in terms of performance and integrity. The initial recommendation would be to never locate the database or BI files on anything but fault tolerate drives. Your data is worth far, far more than the additional cost of the required drives. The first components that could be combined would be the operating system and the Vantage application code. The BI file should be the last component you combine with something else.
Also, consider having a spare drive or two on the system. You?ll often find you need them later. It will let you have a spare copy of the database for testing, give space for expansion during a version upgrade or have a ready formatted drive in case of disk failure.
The Database Before Image (BI) file
The purpose of the before image file is to guarantee database integrity. The BI file itself is perhaps the most I/O intensive component of the system. Consequently, in a busy environment, the BI file should be on its own disk allowing the disk read/write head to remain positioned over the BI file reducing seek time and improving performance. In a hardware rich environment, the BI file should also have its own controller. Be aware that the performance boost you can experience by locating the database before image (BI) file on its own dedicated drive will be reduced if any other file activity occurs on that same drive.
In a transaction rich environment, with lots of reads and writes to the database, the Progress Before Image (BI) log file in particular is a bad choice for RAID 5. Its? sequential nature and high transactional volume are adverse to a striped set and the inherent write penalty of the RAID 5 configuration. When using RAID 5, locate only the Progress database files (DB, D1, D2?) on the RAID 5 array. The parity type of overhead doesn?t require as much additional disk space for these much larger database files, while still giving protection against single drive failures. Avoid locating the database BI file on a RAID 5 array.
Vantage processes like Global Scheduling, MRP, and new version Schema Updates, that by their nature perform a large number of writes to disk, will run slower when the database files are located on a RAID5 array. How much slower will depend on factors such as RAID technology (controllers, disk drives) implemented and the size of your database files. If your goal is to maximize performance, RAID10 will out perform RAID5 in terms of writes and offer similar read performance. If maximum overall performance is your goal, select RAID10 for your drive configuration.
For DB, I'd stay away from software RAID, especially with ATA disks.
Cheers!
