I believe Microsoft states best practice for the Exchange database and transaction logs is to move/install them off the system partition. My question is how much of a performance impact does this really make? Let me give you an idea of a typical scenario when I do a server setup. In most cases I'm using SBS, Exchange mailboxes are generally in the number of 5 - 20. We usually deal with a SATA RAID1/5 (sometimes SAS drives are utilized). In the past, our business did partitioning for various OS volumes. At present, we usually make a single partition for the system drive, end of story.Soback to the focus of my thread, will throwing Exchange database and log files on another partition really make any type of noticeable performance difference with such a small number of mail enabled users? If you're getting ready to answer, "yes", let me throw one more question at you. Let's say I'm using a single array hardware RAID. Obviously, it doesn't matter how many partitions you create, you're still going to be writing data to all the drives in that array. Why, bother? I've never ran into a situation where moving the DB and logs onto another partition made any significant difference. Am I totally missing the boat or is this practice geared more towards enterprise Exchange environments?

A main reasoning for seperating the file across speerate partitions is also to protect against data loss/corruption on a single partition. The best practices really speak well to large-deployment production scenarios where the local system will be on DAS and the DBs and Logs will be on dedicated, externally-attached disks (SAN, NAS, iSCSI, etc). On a low-utliization server with a single DAS array, I'd still partition seperate volumes for system, DB, and logs, and properly size them so that if one volume were to accidentelly fill up it would not bring down all the Mailbox Stores on that server (assuming multiple stores are used.) Which version of Exchange are you using?