Drive config pros and cons

[ABOzIT]

I am about to reconfigure my PE2550 with some larger hard drives. I was going to put in 3 X 73Gb drives and configure them as one RAID 5 container giving me 146GB then create 2 volumes, one for the OS and the other for my application data. Then I had an idea to use one of the smaller drives I was taking out as one container for the OS and use the 3 new drives as another container for my applications.

Besides having no redundancy for my OS can anyone think of any other pros and cons from this config. I want to make sure I'm covering all bases before I proceed.

Thanks!

 

[NickFerrar]

Don't do it unless you have 2 smaller drives and can RAID1 mirror them for the OS. The loss of redundancy in itself is reason enough not to do it, assuming it's a production server.

 

[LawnBoy]

Ditto what Nick said. RAID1 for OS, RAID5 for data.

 

[technome]

On raid adapters I have tried raid 1 for the OS and raid 5 for the data. I find it noticeably slower, raid 1 drives thrash a great deal, and are consistantly warmer. Raid adapters are not optimized for raid 1.

My general setups consist of a raid 5 volume with two partitions, one for the OS and one for data. Fairly safe, I have had corruption on the OS partition, and purposely destroyed OS partitons, every time the data partition remains intact.

 

[ABOzIT]

Thanks for your input guys! Makes good sense.

Cheers!