Best practices on SBS for Hard Drive

[dphoneguy24]

Using a hardware RAID - should I have the OS on 2 drives in a RAID 1 and then maybe 3 other drives (minimum) in a RAID 5 for the data store? Should the RAID 1 (OS) drive be partitioned in any particular way?
Should the RAID 5 array be partitioned in any special way?

Small amount of users probably will be going with SBS 2008 server - would like everyone's documents on the Server + will need quite a bit of room for shared folders/files.

Any input is appreciated.

Thanks

 

[technome]

Should the RAID 1 (OS) drive be partitioned in any particular way?"
Raid 1 is inherently the safest raid config without spending a great deal of money. Unless lightning, major power surge, or a firmware bug hits the machine, odds of two drives dying in a raid 1, in a short time (say a week or two) are near astronomical. Get small drives for this, say roughly 30 Gig or more, place the OS, program installations and copy installation CD to a folder.
If you get larger drives I would partition the drive, say 40Gig for the OS, remainder for whatever. You want the OS separated from everything else primarily for organization, and file security; also helps in case your system get a virus or malware (easier cleanup).

"then maybe 3 other drives (minimum) in a RAID 5 for the data store"
You could add another raid 1 or a raid 5. Raid 5 will give you a higher read rate than a raid 1 but there is a write penalty due to parity creation, which on a small network is not a major factor, as caching on raid adapters helps to eliminate the issue; on a heavily stress servers, the write penalty is an issue. Also on raid 5, I would use 4 drives as a minimum, the added drive increases throughput over a 3 drive raid 5.

Perhaps it might be wise to get all the drives the same size, purchasing a spare which you use as a "global spare" in the raid setup...should one of the drives in either array fails, the global spare would automatically take it's place...basically how I setup arrays.



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Chernobyl disaster..a must see pictorial

http://www.kiddofspeed.com/default.htm

 

[58sniper]

If you get larger drives I would partition the drive, say 40Gig for the OS, remainder for whatever.

Such as just the swap file.

If you can afford more drives, I'd go for RAID 1+0 for everything but the OS/paging volumes.

I like to have drives dedicated to Exchange, but that might not be practical for a really small shop. The number of users wasn't specified.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/