We are needing to spread out the work directories as a space issue. While I could Span the volumes that I want to enable as work directories, I feel the overhead of having essentially a software RAID makes this not the ideal option. We would be spanning SSD volumes and spinning disk volumes, which also does not soud ideal. While it may work, from a systems administration standpoint it is far from ideal to span disk on separate systems (one local and one SAN) that have differing core architectures.   As the Systems Administrator, I am trying to find the best solution for Budget, Systems, and mainly SAS users experience. To me, it seems far less cumbersome to let SAS decide which sessions to place on what volumes than to have the other complexities of Hardware and intermingled spanned disks. ... View more

Thank you kindly.   The link you provided appeared to be for a UNIX system, but our production environment is Windows Server 2008 R2. Do you know if the same logic applies for specifying work or scratch directories?   I will give this a try over the weekend, but naturally prefer to be as well-armed as possible going into a maintenance window. Does the file/folder require any special permissions or can i just clone the permissions the current work directory had?   I agree with you about the IO bind completely from what I have seen from our Monitoring software. I must admit that the main reason for this isn't to spread out the IO, but because of space. I do like when I can kill two birds with one stone though. The current work volume is on SSDs and I am adding a volume that is on a Serial Attached SCSI SAN with 15k drives, so hopefully IO wont take too much of a hit. As a side note - I am considering an HP I/O Accelerator card as well, but more for future proofing. Ref: HP I/O Accelerator   I appreciate you getting back with me on this so rapidly.   Robert ... View more