Using Symbolic Links Striping means that you have many disks and put the first block on the first disk, the second block on the second disk, and the  N -th block on the ( N  MOD  number_of_disks ) disk, and so on. This means if your normal data size is less than the stripe size (or perfectly aligned), you get much better performance. Striping is very dependent on the operating system and the stripe size, so benchmark your application with different stripe sizes. See Section 8.13.2, “Using Your Own Benchmarks” . The speed difference for striping is  very  dependent on the parameters. Depending on how you set the striping parameters and number of disks, you may get differences measured in orders of magnitude. You have to choose to optimize for random or sequential access. If you do not need to know when files were last accessed (which is not really useful on a database server), you can mount your file systems with the  -o noatime  option. That skips updates to the last access time in inodes on the file system, which avoids some disk seeks. On many operating systems, you can set a file system to be updated asynchronously by mounting it with the  -o async  option. If your computer is reasonably stable, this should give you better performance without sacrificing too much reliability. (This flag is on by default on Linux.) You should be cautious when considering whether to use NFS with MySQL. Potential issues, which vary by operating system and NFS version, include the following: Using NFS within a professional SAN environment or other storage system tends to offer greater reliability than using NFS outside of such an environment. However, NFS within a SAN environment may be slower than directly attached or bus-attached non-rotational storage. If you choose to use NFS, NFS Version 4 or later is recommended, as is testing your NFS setup thoroughly before deploying into a production environment. 8.12.2 Using Symbolic Links Using NFS with MySQL •For reliability, you may want to use RAID 0+1 (striping plus mirroring), but in this case, you need 2 ×  N drives to hold  N  drives of data. This is probably the best option if you have the money for it. However, you may also have to invest in some volume-management software to handle it efficiently. •A good option is to vary the RAID level according to how critical a type of data is. For example, store semi-important data that can be regenerated on a RAID 0 disk, but store really important data such as host information and logs on a RAID 0+1 or RAID  N  disk. RAID  N  can be a problem if you have many writes, due to the time required to update the parity bits. •You can also set the parameters for the file system that the database uses: •MySQL data and log files placed on NFS volumes becoming locked and unavailable for use. Locking issues may occur in cases where multiple instances of MySQL access the same data directory or where MySQL is shut down improperly, due to a power outage, for example. NFS version 4 addresses underlying locking issues with the introduction of advisory and lease-based locking. However, sharing a data directory among MySQL instances is not recommended. •Data inconsistencies introduced due to messages received out of order or lost network traffic. To avoid this issue, use TCP with  hard  and  intr  mount options. •Maximum file size limitations. NFS Version 2 clients can only access the lowest 2GB of a file (signed 32 bit offset). NFS Version 3 clients support larger files (up to 64 bit offsets). The maximum supported file size also depends on the local file system of the NFS server. 1832