>>> >>>Kevin, >>> >>>Thanks for correcting me "a 4MB stripe width will reduce the >>>odds there will be cross-stripe reads, but in no way >>>eliminates it.", you're quite right. >>>I should have made that point myself. no worries...I'm not sure people are yet taking a sufficiently simplistic look at SAME. It really is supposed to be simple... threads bled off into confusion between stripe width and depth and I sort of bailed. The simplest rule is stripe across all disks. The only subtlety is regarding what st widths some arrays support and whether you have to use a software vol mgr to cunk together LUNs from the array. Oracle can do a 1MB IO (scattered read, direct path read/write) so make the stripe width larger than that...and if the array wont stripe that large (as some I work with), then go with the largest it does support. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l