Dear List,

We have just bought a new workstation and separate managed RAID unit
to run our FB server on.

Im trying to maximize the speed of FB using this config but first I
would like to know a very basic thing.

In the past we had FB 1.5 running on a dual Xeon with Raid 0 and 8
U160 SCSI Drives. It was running Windows XP SP2. We have had
constant problems with this all in one box so we are moving to the
above solution.

I would ideally like to keep windows xp on the single hard drive
(U320) on the Workstation as I have heard running Windows Kernel
accross a RAID can cause problems. I dont want to suffer from an FB
point of view which is why we have splashed out on this gear to
begin with.

Am I right in saying that if I shift the windows page file over to
the raid disk entirely and keep the FB databases on the raid then
the fact that windows is on the much slower single drive wont matter?

Also do i need to shift the temp folder where fb stores its sort
files over to the raid too? (and how do I do this?).

Any other thoughts over what raid level to use (we are thinking 10
right now) and how we might maximise FB's throughput would be
welcome.

We have approx 28 million records in five databases that need to be
constantly updated and take a while to do. The workstation is 2 x
3.6 Xeons with two channel U320 Card in a PCI-x 133 slot, 2 gb of
memory. The raid is a 14 drive U320 with 36gb U320 drives. Most of
our databases have a page file size of 8192 and we use database
workbench to do all our work. Our apps are IBO powered.

PS. Since the workstation is a dual processor again (which means I
can carry on working as per normal while FB is flat out!) should I
install the classic server instead of super server? There will only
be one person logged into the FB server at one time so is this a
benefit by using both xeons?

Many thanks for any info you can give!

Andy.