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Design consideration for Exchange

Just a question for the other experts out there..

On a virtual server with a 10k SAS Array and a 7.2k SAS Array, where would you put the Exchange databases?

-It's an organisation of 20x SBS2011 users
-Space on the 10K array is limited to 300GB (we need to use it sparingly), 1TB on the 7.2k array
-All Exchange users will be using cached Exchange mode
-There are other LOB programs/databases which will be taking up a lot of the 10k Array, do we really need Exchange be on the faster array?

We normally put the OS and databases requiring fast access on the faster array and all data on the slower one including Exchange databases. Bearing in mind most of our clients are < 25 SBS users, are there any disadvantages to designing this way?
Storage HardwareExchange

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Postmaster
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Speed is more critical for logs than for database. Logs are cleared each backup, and should not be on the same physical drives as the database.
If the disks run a write cache, you will not notice much difference.
Make sure you have some form of RAID to cope with a drive failure. (mirror at minimum)
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ASKER

Thanks for your reply, both arrays are in a RAID1 mirror with write cache enabled (controller is battery backed).
There wont be an unusual volume of emails and if all users are using cached exchange mode, a slight degradation in performance surely wont be noticed by the end users.
And we have the logs and databases on different logical partitions, but the same array of physical hard drives. For the scale we're dealing with separate disks would be overkill.
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Probably a more important consideration is any other I/O intensive applications. eg. best not to share disk with SQL or file and print for example.

Honestly for the handful of users you have, it will cope easily. You may even consider a hosted Exchange service for so few users.
Exchange
Exchange

Exchange is the server side of a collaborative application product that is part of the Microsoft Server infrastructure. Exchange's major features include email, calendaring, contacts and tasks, support for mobile and web-based access to information, and support for data storage.

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