ML 350 8x 600 GB SAS drives in raid 5

[Aartjansen]

I was wondering if theres any benefit in having 1x 3.8Tb array, partitioned in windows. Or having several logical volumes created in the size required (still all RAID5) and formatted in windows as physically distinct drives.
My main concern is performance. Secondly expanding the array in the future if required.

TIA

[Michael A. McKenney]

3 RAID 5 drives of 600GB. write performance will not be good. What are you placing on it? I would consider RAID 10 with four drives. You would get better writes and not much slower reads.

[Aartjansen]

3? Theres 8 drives. RAID 10 would waste half the capacity of the drives down to 2.2Tb Which just isn't enough anyway.

[Michael A. McKenney]

RAID 5 on 3-8 drives will have very slow writes, 50-80 MB/s for the array. Parity writes will slow you down. If you are copying a lot of 32KB or smaller files, it can take days to move data. RAID 10 does not have this issue. You don't want your OS or paging file on RAID 5. They are recommended for RAID 1 or 10. Read all the horror stories about RAID 5 disk performance on writes.

If performance is your issue, don't do RAID 5. you will regret it on writes.