I've hesitated going to ASM for the reasons Jared listed and also because my SA's had such a hard time getting their heads around it. I'm using it on a new server that we have hooked up to a Pillar Data storage system. www.pillardata.com . Pillar lets you have a 1MB stripe size and as this matches ASM I went with this (10.2.0.4). In my very preliminary testing I'm getting the same performance in writes to the database as a straight up cp from one file to another. Does this make sense? Ie. I can copy a file at 183MB/sec and I can also get sqlloader at the same rate. I've never had this match up in any of my other systems. It was only after digging around that I figured out Pillar had the 1MB solution. Before that we were just using a regular filesystem. My speed there was 90MB/sec. To be fair, I haven't fully tested the filesytemio_options as I think I need it at direct to compare apples to apples. There is a learning curve with ASM, for instance, my first db creation failed so I had to go into ASM and delete the controlfiles. That was a hassle and I have a lot more learning to do but it has been enjoyable to play with something new. Pillar also has a cool EM plugin that lets you see everything which makes it a lot easier to view performance specs. I have another question with ASM but I think I'll post it as a new thread. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l