Databases often grow to become quite large, and a huge amount of data on one drive means that the drive and drive controller become a serious bottleneck. Using multiple disks and controllers (using RAID) is one method to overcome this, and most flavors of RAID have extra redundancy features.
Symbolic links are a way of splitting databases or tables across multiple disks without using RAID. By creating a link from one drive to another, the bottleneck of one overused drive is eased.
Featured in this chapter:
Using RAID
Using symbolic links