Hardware I/O Layout for Files and Filegroups

Spreading data across as many physical drives as possible is advantageous because it improves throughput by using parallel data access with multiple files. With hardware striping, all files are evenly spread across all disks in the stripe set. The data objects are assigned to a filegroup that proportionately fills each file.

This is an easy setup for the database administrator because it is one big logical drive. All files are created on the same large logical file, but physically they are spread across all disks.

In the previous section, the illustration of hardware striping shows one disk controller for all of the disks. Multiple disk controllers potentially can improve I/O throughput. The illustration of separating data objects for performance shows an I/O subsystem setup with multiple disk controllers. You can set up only one hardware stripe set per controller, therefore the illustration shows two separate stripe sets.