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Wibble_

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**EASY** New Server Disk allocation - best practice?

New exchange server, hardware not ideal, but all we got. Best way to set it up?

Exchange 2003, windows 2003 std

6 Disks. 4x300gb 10krpm, 2x72gb 15krpm

approx 1200 low to medium useage users.

I was thinking either

3 x RAID 0
   2x72gb as system & pagefile
   2x300 as transaction logs
   2x300 as FSG (first storage group)

or

1 x RAID 0  &  1 x RAID 10
   2x72gb RAID0 as system, pagefile & logs
   4x300 RAID10 as FSG

or is there a better way?
Avatar of amaheshwari
amaheshwari
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I would suggest :

4 Disks in Raid 10 (partition for Database, Logs different drives in this)
2 Disk in Raid1 (for OS and Exchange Binaries)

Thats the best combination...

Or
you can have 4 disks in Raid5 for exchange
and two in raid 1 for  OS and exchange binaries.

There is no use of Raid 0 as it will not provide Fault Tolerence.Which is most important thing here.
ABsolutely agree with amaheshwari's second option - Raid 1 and Raid 5
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ormerodrutter
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Wibble_

ASKER

Oops, typo up there. Should have been:

or

1 x RAID 1  &  1 x RAID 10
   2x72gb RAID1 as system, pagefile & logs
   4x300 RAID10 as FSG

ormerodrutter, never raid 0+1, always raid 1+0 it take FAR less time to rebuild after faliure
also, RAID5 for an exchange machine is a bad idea, it takes ages to rebuild after a disk fail, ands during this itme i have heard stories of a second disk going...


I hadn't thought about putting the FSG and logs on the same spindles, Everything I have read says that is a very bad idea.
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