in general 'the bigger the pool the better'.  For mass storage, larger
drives are good, but to do lots of reads and writes smaller drives (more
heads over the data) tend to give better performance.  More spindles are
good for better access to the data.

Personally I like LOTS OF BIG DRIVES (grunt grunt - Tim Allen style).  If we
could slice our RAID up like I would like, we would put the database on
36's, striped over mirrors (RAID1+0) with small cluster sizes for better
random access performance, and use RAID5 over lots of BIG drives for disk
pool, with large cluster sizes.

But as always YMMV, and every solution is unique to the exact application.

Overall, I guess the answer to your question is YES. :)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Coviello, Paul [SMTP:PCoviello AT ELLIOT-HS DOT ORG]
> Sent: Tuesday, January 07, 2003 9:58 AM
> To:   ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
> Subject:      increasing the number of drives, what size?
>
> We are looking at expanding our drive capacity and we were discussing
> whether or not to go with 36gb drives or 72's in a raid 5 config. any
> thoughts on either?
>
> thanks
>
> Paul