6 Apr
2000
6 Apr
'00
5:37 p.m.
I think the more important part is not where there is a "sweet spot" in the performance curve, if any, but rather that ultimately the disk subsystem does limit your throughput. I'm not aware of any recent data on thus, but my experience shows that you are limited to 100-200 ops per disk (it depends on your actual ops mix). You can see some old data on this in the white paper:
http://www.netapp.com/tech_library/3008.html
So if you are having performance issues with a 4 drive volume, it doesn't matter if the "sweet spot" is 3 drives or 5 drives; you can should still get better performance by adding another drive!
Bruce