We have a server with all of our hardware resources set up, now we will need to set up service accounts.
You will need a service account for SQL itself, another for the SQL Agent Service, and if installing other SQL applications (like Analysis Services, etc.) you will want a dedicated service account for each service.
For my lab, my SQL Servers will have five disk volumes, which have already been created:
C: Local disk, will have the OS and SQL engine running on it.
P: SQLDataDrive, where all of the SQL Data Files will live
Q: SQLLog, where all of the SQL transaction log files go
R: tempDB, where I will put all of tempDB, to isolate it’s activity from the other disk resources
S: SQLBackups, separate volume for backups for a couple of reasons. First, if the volume that the data files are on fails, it would be nice if the backups were on a different volume. Second, again, we want to isolate the disk activity for the backups from the actual data and log files.
Now, in my VirtualBox lab, I do not have any RAID set up – it is a lab.
Once you have the SQL server ready for install, but before the install, you can stress test the disk volumes. There are two well known tools for this – SQLIO and SQLIOSim. SQLIO actually has nothing to do with SQL. It can be configured to run tests on you disk subsystem with all sorts of parameters to determine if you might have a disk bottleneck before you even install SQL.
SQLIO can be downloaded here http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=20163
There is a tutorial on SQLServerPedia by Brent Ozar (b|t) here that is better than anything I can produce. http://sqlserverpedia.com/wiki/SAN_Performance_Tuning_with_SQLIO
Whereas SQLIO generates a generic IO test on your disk subsystem, SQLIOSim simulates a SQL workload. Again, I leave this to smarter people to discuss. In this case, Kevin Kline (b|t):
http://sqlblog.com/blogs/kevin_kline/archive/2007/06/28/understanding-sqliosim-output.aspx