Question : SATA 3 Gb/s & SATA 6 Gb/s Question

Hi Experts,

I have a total of four hard drives installed in a PC. Three of them are SATA 3 Gb/s and the one is SATA 6 Gb/s. The mobo supports both SATA 3 Gb/s and SATA 6 Gb/s. I have Windows 7 Professional 64-bit installed on the SATA 6 Gb/s and the other drives are connect with data, ect on them. Those drives again are SATA 3 Gb/s. I notice sometimes when I click on the drive(s), not all of the time, that it takes about, a few seconds for it to respond then I can access the drive(s). It's almost like I'm running a lot of things in the background.

Could it be that I have one SATA 6 Gb/s which contains the OS and the three SATA 3 Gb/s which contains data, ect? One drive is faster than the other three?

Thanks!

Answer : SATA 3 Gb/s & SATA 6 Gb/s Question

There are many SQL Server operations that use tempdb to perform sorts and things like that.  Tempdb may bloat to very large sizes.  Restarting SQL Server will shrink tempdb since it's recreated every time SQL starts.  However, this may not be an option in your environment.

Best practice is to put tempdb on a separate disk and make sure it's adequately sized for your day to day operations.

FWIW, temp tables should be automatically destroyed when the connection that created them is dropped.  Table variables are good if you have the memory to support them.