RAID Config for a DL380 G6

[Tuscani_1]

Hey all, I am setting up a new file server that will have 8x300GB drives.. I am trying to decide if I should setup one big RAID5 for OS and Data or split out with OS RAID1 and data RAID5. I'd like to do RAID10 but I have 800GB of data to migrate over and I want lots of avail space for growth. But I also hate wasting two 300GB disks for just the OS. Thoughts?

[Michael A. McKenney]

RAID 1 for OS and paging/swap

Microsoft recommends RAID 1 or 10 for OS and paging.

You could do one RAID 10 array, 6 active, two spares for fail over. Two logical paritions

I would keep RAID 1 separate from RAID 10 unless you have a SAN. RAID 5 could be very slow on parity writes.

[Tuscani_1]

Ok.. so one big RAID10? I thought that would use up 4 of eight drives leaving me only 1200GB?

[Michael A. McKenney]

You can do 8 RAID 10 drives, I would recommend at least one hot spare or two. I usually do two hot spares for RAID 10 because of the pairs.

Microsoft recommends RAID 1 or 10 for OS and paging file. I usually do OS, paging, and app/data partitions. I keep paging separate because in Windows 2008, you can extend and shrink a partition without a paging/swap file. In 64-bit OS, I usually do 60 GB paging/swap partition.

[Ali]

Hi Tuscani,

I agree. if you create just 1 logical drive with RAID 1+0, you would get only half of the space (1200 GB).

So if you want to save another 600 GB space

create Raid 1 with 2 hard drives and Raid 5 with 6 hard drives.

this way your OS will get extra protection and performance by implementing recommended raid 1, and more space by implementing another raid (raid 5) for data.

Raid 5 read performance is excellent and write performance can also be manage with BBWC and stripe size, acelerator settings.

if the data for which you are creating seperate raid 5 is not database type (where you need simaltanious read or write depending on the application) then Raid 5 is the ideal choice for your environment.

example of my setup..
I have Raid 5 with 5 disks setup for an application which not write extensive and writes are equal to my stripe size, I get wonderful performance.

thanks,
Aftab