Tempdb location

[bobbo]

We have three separate disks for our sql server.
Disk c : system
Disk d : data
Disk e : logs

A couple of months ago our IT manager moved the tempdb database from the c drive to the d and e drives because it had grown to 9Gb and the c drive had run out of space. When I discovered this, I shrank tempdb back to it's specified size of 1.9Gb and now I want to move it back to the c drive because I believe we will see better performance with the system + tempdb together than with the data/logs + tempdb together. Am I correct?

A couple of notes. Server is used exclusively by SQL server. We have three large databases (40Gb, 20Gb, 15Gb), three databases around 4Gb databases and around 15 smaller databases. Most of them are accessed exclusively from a web application.

[skhanal]

How many physical disks you have?. What kind of RAID level you have on these drives?.

Moving tempdb to C: may or may not help depending on how the drives are laid out.

[rmiao]

Not good idea to share tempdb with os an binaries on same disk array, better to put it on it's own array.

[bobbo]

There are three physical disks
Disk c : system
Disk d : data
Disk e : logs
I'm not sure how they are set up in terms of raid.
Is there not a rule of thumb so that n disks will lead to a particular placement of system, data, logs and tempdb?

[skhanal]

To apply rule of thumb you need the fourth drive. In your case you have to chose the one with less disk IO. You can do that by monitoring it from Performance monitor. Also measure IOs for tempdb itself.

[rmiao]

If all you get are partitions on single disk array, don't make any difference in performance point of view and can put tempdb in any partition.