What kind of disks? What is the target response time you are designing for?

Every disk has a curve associated with it. The more IOPS you load agains a spindle, the slower the response time of each IO. If I'm tageting a response time of 20ms, For a 10K SCSI spindle I use 85 IOPS. For a 15K SCSI spindle at a 20ms response time, it varies from 110 to 130 depending mainly on the average seek time. I tend to stay on the conservative side and use 110 unless I know the characteristics of the specific drive. For RAID 1 or RAID 10, write performance can be expressed as: P*N/2 where P is the performance in IOPS of a single spindles and N is the number of spindles in the RAID set. Read performance of RAID 1/10 can be expressed as P*N. Next, you'll need to measure your read/write ratio using the physical disk counters. 10 years ago, when 5.5 was introduced, 6:1 or 8:1 read/write ratios were common. With advances in database eficiency and client side caching, today it's far more likely to be 2:1 or 3:1. Your best bet is to measure. To continue the example we'll assume 2:1. The mixed performance is (write performance * .67) + (read performance * .33) with a 2:1 read/write ratio.