I know this has been discussed before, but I'm interested in in current
belief/discussions regarding this, out of context of someone's immediate
problem.

The whole question of whether or not to use RAID 5 for your database, logs,
and disk pools.

Here are my current understandings of the topic:

each volume defined to adsm gets it's own thread to work with, (db, log,
or stg)
adsm does attempt to prioritize reads/writes within a thread to optimize
them as much as is possible

Assuming both of these to be true, the generic theory of life would be that
one should be OK to do either of two things

have multiple disks, each with one volume on them (no raid), so that there
are separate threads going to each spindle with no head contention.
have a single volume with a single thread, but make that thread really
fast (lots of disk RAIDed together).

This being said, I have had clients who have benefited from converting their
raid sets (with multiple volumes on the set - read - head contention on all
spindles) to individual volumes on sparate disks.

I have also heard from others who claim they got better performance by
switching to a raid set.  My thoughts here would be that if you're going to
have a raid set, that you're better off making it one big massive volume so
that you don't have head contention.  This of course comes at the cost of
only having one thread.  Has anyone found a line where having multiple
threads going to the single raid set would offset the head contention enough
to make it worthwhile?

What does everyone think about the different configs?

Paul