How to get optimal drive performance for a DB on SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Ed.?

Question

So I am pretty green when it comes to hardware configurations.

I just asked a coworker and he said we're using RAID 60 (I assume is the same as RAID 6+0).

I am doing some tests on a large table (1 billion rows), and setup a different partition for each day of data. From what I understand I would want to ideally put each partition on a separate filegroup and each filegroup would get its own dedicated disk.

Am I right that creating "virtual" drives for each FG is not going to make a difference since all of the storage is coming off of a RAID 60 "device"?

Is there anything I can do to improve disk performance when creating an index on a table of this size?

Answer 1

Am I right that creating "virtual" drives for each FG is not going to make a difference since all of the storage is coming off of a RAID 60 "device"?

Yes you are absolutely right. That data is already striped all over that array.

Is there anything I can do to improve disk performance when creating an index on a table of this size?

Unless you have control over the hardware and RAID setup, there is nothing you can do. CREATE INDEX will run in parallel with Enterprise Ed but that is on by default anyway.