Excellent articles on SQL Server IO best practices and architecture are here:
SQL Server 2000 I/O Basics
SQL Server IO Best Practices Article
We can use the SQL Server IO stress tool to find out issues with IO subsystems on your servers:
SQLIOStress.exe
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;231619 SQLIO.exe
http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/3/f/f3f92f8b-b24e-4c2e-9e86-d66df1f6f83b/SQLIO.msi
A few questions I have on the architecture:
Why sql server page size is 8Kb?
Why extend size is always 64 kb?
Heard that in oracle we can configure the page size, extent sizes for individual tables.
I still have to find out more about the IO disk subsystem, OS data blocks, Storage block sizes etc to find out why MS chose nonconfigurable sizes for pages and extents.
I'll updated this blog soon.