Raid advice for new DC

[CRAIG2432]

Hi there.

I am upgrading our 2000 sever to 2003 and also upgradeing the server its self (Dell 1900). I have 400 users ( 200 max at anyone time) and 103 workstations/laptops ( max 80 at anyone time)

At present we have a single 40Gig IDE drive for the OS (bad i know)No raid
Resourses are split over 3 160Gig IDE drives Again No raid.

I am proposing 2 x 80 Gig SATA drives Raid 0 for the OS. But its the resourse drive I cannot deside on the best course of action. The infomation is on 3 different drives to split the load, rarther than all on one drive. So do I have 3 sets of 160Gig drives in Raid 0.

The director wanted me to install a single 500Gig drive, partition it into 3 and configure Raid 0 from each 160 Gig drive onto one of the partions of the 500 Gig drive but this is crazy. As it would reduce performance.

As always cost meeds to be reasonable but performance
needs to be up (same old story).

Any advice would be great.

 

[kbing]

Best method here would be not to use Raid 0 because there is no redundancy. You need RAID 1.

So...I would recommend that you use 2 x 76GB harddrives configured in RAID 1 - using raid controller not Microsoft Windows.

If you need to store additional data on the box, then either put in 2x300GB raid 1 or 3x300GB raid 5. You'll get 300GB or 600GB worth of disk space, respectively.

The director's option is not good - no redundancy - you might as well just put in the single drive and use 1 big partition.

Keep in mind, for performance, raid 1 will be better than raid 5 because raid 5 has additional overhead that the disk needs to perform. So the best redundant solution would be RAID 1.

If you can afford it, then RAID1+0 for the data drives is better but you have to start with 4 disks and only 50% is usable space. Great performance though.

 

[CRAIG2432]

Sorry my mistake I ment Raid 1. Thats what happens when you type and answer the phone at the sama time.

You said to use 2 x 73Gig HD's for the OS. I take it these are SCSI and if so do I need the performance they offer for the OS. When it has booted up there should not be that much usage on them?

 

[LawnBoy]

Oh, yes there's lots of activity on the system drive. Swap File is being written and read continuously.

 

[LawnBoy]

Oh, yes there's lots of activity on the system drive. Swap File is being written and read continuously.

 

[NickFerrar]

If it's just a domain controller then yes a RAID-1 mirror with 73GB 15k drives should be more than adequate. If that gets overloaded you need additional DCs not faster IO in that DC.