Hard Drive Speed - 2 HD's v's 1?

[MrBridger]

Hi all,

I have a question with regard to Hard Drive Speed for which I am unable to find an answer to on the web. I am updating my Exchange Server and would like to know whether to employ 4 x 72 GB hard drives or 2 x 146 GB, both using RAID 5, ?

The 146G option is a lot more cost effective but I am wondering wil this hamper its performance in relation to speed? Obviously there will be multiple users accessing data simultaneously so the data access nature will be random.

I would greatly appreciate any advice from anyone on this subject, particularly anyone with any experiance with this little poser?!

Thanks in advance,

-Mr. Bridger.

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"You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!!"
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[technome]

Don't have much time...
First of all, you can not do raid 5 with two disks, so for bare minimum you would need (3) 146 gig drives

On an scsi array, with disks from the same manufacturer, with the same specifications ( eg. rpm, latency etc) more disks in array will give better performance. Generally the smaller capacity scsi drives have slightly better specs then the largest capacity drives.

 

[cdogg]

I'm not sure about all the specs with various SCSI drives, but with IDE drives, the larger capacity drives tend to have faster disk access times. This is due to higher density disk platters which translates to less head movement when doing sequential reads.

Just a matter of opinion. You probably can't go wrong either way. But like technome stated, you have to use at least 3 HD for RAID 5 arrays.


~cdogg
[tab]"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources"
[tab][tab]- A. Einstein