RAID levels on DL180-G6

[Bill Clark_12]

Have new DL180-G6 with x2 146GB, 15k SAS drives that I will use in a single mirrored array for the Windows 2008 R2 OS. I have x6 300GB, 15K SAS drives that I will use for data. My question is what would be a better setup for speed & reliability? Option 1 would be to create an array with 3 of the drives and mirror that with the remaining 3 drives. Option 2 would be to setup all 6 drives in a RAID 5 setup (possibly with an online spare). Each method will give me plenty of usable space as we are replacing a storage server that currently only has 250gb total. This will be our main "file server", word, excel, etc. No SQL or Exchange. This server also has x4GB nic's that will be teamed and has the P410 controller with 512mb upgrade. Really needing to know what option would give best performance. Thanks.

[TTr]

The best thing would be to do your own testing. Setup both options and run some tests using iozone. If you don't have time for testing, either option would work fine for a fileserver.

How many users would you have in this environment?

[Michal Kapalka (mikap)]

hi,

we have 1000 active users, Dl380G4 Windows 2003 R2 + file screening + big folder structure.

2x 36GB/15k - raid1 ( system )
4x 300GB/10k - raid5 ( data )

now i would recomend to use RAID10, with 6 disks.

CPU and Network utilization is around 10%, but if we activated shadow image, there was a bootleneck on the Storage LEVEL.

- so i would do 2x disk for system, and all available disk in to RAID10, and if you have time make the I/O tests ( nechmarks ).


mikap

[Bill Clark_12]

Less than 100 users total, pretty small. I will take a look at IOZone, hadn't heard of that program before. I will try to post results back on the 2 different options posted above. Thanks.