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Best Hard Drive Configuration for a SBS 2003 Setup?

I've got a Dell Poweredge 2500 server with a PERC RAID card and six hard drives. It's got the equivalent of a SBS 2003 setup, being the PDC, with Exchange Server, SQL Server, and Anti-virus management for about 50 users. (Another server takes care of the file and printer shares.)

My current setup is to have a 2-disk RAID 1 mirror partitioned with the system files and program files. And 3-disk RAID 5 stripe set with the data files. The sixth disk is a spare sitting on the shelf.

I plan to refresh and upgrade the hard drives and I'm wondering if this is the best setup? Or should I do some swapping as I upgrade, such as partitioning the RAID 5 for the program files and data files? What about swap files or shadow copy volume files?

The servers seems to be up to its tasks, but if I'm going to swap in new drives, I wonder if it would be better to change things around?

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Lee W, MVP

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rindi

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TerrellITC

ASKER

Sorry for the late awarding of points. Lee, I was waiting for more feedback. :-)

From what I understand, on a Dell Poweredge a hot spare saves only a few minutes time as the RAID can only be rebuilt from the RAID's BIOS program. So you have to shut the server down anyhow. So why put unnecessary wear on a drive?

Lee W, MVP

Sorry - lost track of the question. That's not the case - I've seen Dell PERC controllers rebuild RAIDs as soon as the drive fails. In addition, if you use Dell Open Manage Array Manager, you can do all that from within Windows.

TerrellITC

ASKER

Well, I'll have to check on that 'cause the error light is flashing on one of my server's hard drives. :-)