Help on building a new Server I am in the process of building a new server to run our SQL Server databases (we have many TB's of data). I am looking for some help on what I should request for hard drives. My thought was to have 5 logical drives:

Drive 1: System drive
Drive 2: Database drive for DB's with a lot of read/writes
Drive 3: Database drive for other DB's and TempDB
Drive 4: Log files
Drive 5: Backups and other storage

Would this be a good setup? What type of disk (SSD or other) and RAID should I use for each drive? Keep in mind I'm trying to get the most bang for the buck. I don't have an unlimited budget, and I want to spend a lot on RAM.
If this is local storage, layout matters a lot more. If it's SAN storage, things are a little bit different.

Here's what I do for local storage:


Put big data files (mdf, ndf) for user databases on non-SSD storage
Put log files (ldf), and tempdb (all files) on SSD


Data files are typically around 80-90% reads to writes. You can mitigate the "slow" part of reading from them by, as you say, "spend[ing] a lot on RAM". RAID 5 or 6 is the usual choice here.

Log files and tempdb are different, and they need to absorb a lot of writes quickly. They're a much better fit for faster tiers of storage. RAID 10 is the usual choice here.

The system drive storage class isn't terribly important here, but I'd make a note that backups either shouldn't be done locally, or they should be copied to redundant storage. If you lose your backup drive, you, well... Don't have backups.

If this is SAN storage, what matters even more than drive layout and storage tiers is making sure you have adequate networking paths between the server and the SAN.

For more details why, see this Q&amp;A: SQL Server has encountered occurences of I/O requests taking longer than 15 seconds.