Optimizing for I/O

Generally, workstations and servers have random I/O activity--rather than all disk reads coming from a specific section of a disk, they come from different places in the file system, as users access files, access Web pages, read mail, or do any other activities supported on your system.

In order to maximize performance, you want all disks to be busy most of the time servicing I/O requests.

For example, assume you have a 36 Gb file system. If you stripe across four 9 Gb disks, and if the I/O load is truly random and evenly dispersed across the entire range of the table space, then each of the four disks will tend to be equally busy and overall performance would be better than it would be with a single 36Gb drive.