Performance Questions - disks

I recently started collecting historical performance statistics from our SQL
servers. I am gathering information from the big four counters, CPU, RAM,
Disk, Network. In addition, I am watching CPU and RAM for the sqlservr.exe
process.
On one server, %disk time is rather high and so is disk queue length. CPU
is around 50%. This seems like an obvious disk bottleneck. In a
multi-processor system, is %disk time based off a 100% max for total CPU or
200% for each indivual processor? Also, can defragmenting the hard drive
reduce the disk queue length?
In our current server implementations, we have maintenance plans that backup
our databases's to files on the same disks as our sql databases's. These
plans run nightly, so there is a lot of disk I/O on these disks. In
addition, I suspect that they are highly fragmented due to all the writing
backup files and deleting old backup files. We also are running around
5-10% of free disk space on this particular server. Since the file system
was formatted with 64 Kbps clusters, I can not defragment the file system.
Questions:
1) Do other admins deploy scheduled defragmentation policies on live sql
volumes? Such as Diskeeper?
2) I read that there are mixed opinions on using 64 Kbps NTFS volumes for
your live SQL DB's.
3) If you are going to backup the DB's to file, I assume the best procedure
for disk utilization is as follows:
SYS - System & SQL Log
DATA - SQL DB
PAGEFILE - Pagefile & SQL backup files
Hi
You ask alot of questions here, but a starter would be to read
SQL Server 2000 Performance Turning Technical Reference ISBN 0-7356-1270-6
http://www.sql-server-performance.co...ing_review.asp
and visit:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...izing_5lt1.asp
http://www.sql-server-performance.com/
John
"Kevin Hammond" <kghammond@.nrscorp.com> wrote in message
news:c5jgrv$429$1@.grandcanyon.binc.net...
> I recently started collecting historical performance statistics from our
SQL
> servers. I am gathering information from the big four counters, CPU, RAM,
> Disk, Network. In addition, I am watching CPU and RAM for the
sqlservr.exe
> process.
> On one server, %disk time is rather high and so is disk queue length. CPU
> is around 50%. This seems like an obvious disk bottleneck. In a
> multi-processor system, is %disk time based off a 100% max for total CPU
or
> 200% for each indivual processor? Also, can defragmenting the hard drive
> reduce the disk queue length?
> In our current server implementations, we have maintenance plans that
backup
> our databases's to files on the same disks as our sql databases's. These
> plans run nightly, so there is a lot of disk I/O on these disks. In
> addition, I suspect that they are highly fragmented due to all the writing
> backup files and deleting old backup files. We also are running around
> 5-10% of free disk space on this particular server. Since the file system
> was formatted with 64 Kbps clusters, I can not defragment the file system.
> Questions:
> 1) Do other admins deploy scheduled defragmentation policies on live sql
> volumes? Such as Diskeeper?
> 2) I read that there are mixed opinions on using 64 Kbps NTFS volumes for
> your live SQL DB's.
> 3) If you are going to backup the DB's to file, I assume the best
procedure
> for disk utilization is as follows:
> SYS - System & SQL Log
> DATA - SQL DB
> PAGEFILE - Pagefile & SQL backup files
>