Partitioning and multiple Disks in Oracle

You can add to the inherent advantages of partitioning by using multiple disks for the different tablespaces that contain the partitions. Placing data on separate disk drives eliminates disk head contention for data in the different partitions. You also can use RAID disk arrays to stripe a partition across multiple disks and add additional I/O threads to operate on them, or you can limit a partition to a single disk to reduce the impact of disk failure on the table.

Solaris 10 10/09: In previous Solaris releases, you could not install and boot the Solaris OS from a disk that was greater than 1 TB in size.
In this Solaris release, you can install and boot the Solaris OS from a disk that is up to 2 TB in size. In previous releases, you also had to use an EFI label for a disk that is larger than 1 TB. In this release, you can use the VTOC label on any size disk, but the addressable space by the VTOC is limited to 2 TB. The Solaris disk drivers and disk utilities have been updated to provide the following support:

Installing and booting the Solaris OS on a two-terabyte disk must be connected to a system that runs a 64-bit kernel, with a minimum of 1 GB of memory. You can use the format -e utility to label a disk of any size with a VTOC label, but the addressable space is limited to 2 TB. The default label that is used by the format utility and the installation software for a disk that is less than 2 TB in size is a VTOC label.
You can use the fdisk utility on a disk that is greater than 1 TB on x86 systems. Support is added for up to 2-TB partitions in the MBR for non-EFI partition types. This support means that Solaris partitions can go up to 2 TB. Other non-EFI partitions may be subject to a limit depending on partition type. When the fdisk utility is run on a disk that is greater than 2 TB in size, a warning message is displayed to indicate that you cannot create a non-EFI partition that is greater than 2 TB. The Solaris Volume Manager software has been modified to create metadevices that support physical disks with VTOC labels up to 2 TB in size.
Keep in mind that you cannot move a disk over 1 TB with a legacy MBR or a legacy VTOC to a previous Solaris release. EFI labeled disks continue to work as in previous Solaris releases. For more information about the EFI label changes in this release, see EFI Disk Label.