Blitz Result: System Databases on C Drive

By default, SQL Server’s databases are installed on the system drive.  This is a recipe for disaster under two situations:

1. If your users do something that require the system databases to grow (like never purging backup history from MSDB or building giant temp tables), they can grow until the system drive runs out of space, and Windows will stop dead.  It’ll be your fault.
2. If someone else does something to run the system drives out of space (like downloading huge files to their desktop or running big Windows Updates), the system will stop dead.  It won’t be your fault – but actually, it still will be.

This part of our SQL Server sp_Blitz script checks sys.master_files for database files on the C drive.  If your system has a non-C system drive, you’ll need to perform this check separately yourself.

To Fix the Problem

Read the Microsoft knowledge base article on how to move SQL Server databases, but try this on a development or test server first.

After this change, you’ll have less reliability risk, and your system may even perform faster if the C drive ran on slow storage.  You can gauge that through Physical Disk Avg sec/Read and sec/Write metrics, or through the file activity DMVs.

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