Perforce hardware considerations

NFS Mounted Disks

Server performance is maximized if the Perforce database files, depot (managed files), and journal files are hosted on a fast locally attached disk, or low latency SAN device.  File locking on an NFS mounted drive is relatively slower, hosting Perforce on NFS will cause significant performance degradation and should be avoided.  

There is no issue on the client side creating workspaces on NFS disks.

Separate Disks for Journal, Database, and Versioned Files

Disaster Recovery

The Database filesystem and Live Journal should be kept on separate filesystems.  This is to avoid a situation where the disk containing the database files gets corrupted and it corrupts the live journal as well.  By keeping them separated this risk can be mitigated and disaster recovery can be accomplished from the journal file.

Performance

Hosting the Journal, Database, and Versioned files on separate disks also divides up the disk I/O between these elements, and maximizes performance of the overall system. It is therefore recommend to split the versioned files (store them in the NFS area) and the db files ( store them on local disk or a SAN).  For more information see the Helix Versioning Engine Administrator Guide.