Hard Disks for Raid

[squeeky]

We are about to virtualise our windows 2008 server and im building the new server for holding the VM. However it currently lacks hard disk space with 2X 250GB WD2500YS SATA Hard disks. Obviously this only gives me 250gb in raid 1. The SAS Controller has 4 Connectors on it but should I add more 250gb hard disks and make a raid 5 or should I add two new 500gb or 1TB drives in Raid 1 ?

Thanks
Squeeky

[FN-GM]

Personally myself i would change all the Disks to SSD or SAS. If its a Virtual host in production you will want something a little faster.

[squeeky]

so would i but got a few budget issues at the moment. Our current server is P4 era so its not running the best in the world

[FN-GM]

Have you checked the Server support Virtualisation? Are you planing on running Hyper-V? If so your host needs to be x64. Does the CPU support it?

[squeeky]

The one replacing it does yes. Its got EMT64 and VT-X

[dhicks]

should I add more 250gb hard disks and make a raid 5 or should I add two new 500gb or 1TB drives in Raid 1 ?

Might as well add two more harddrives, as big as you can afford (2TB disks are available from £50-ish these days). Keep the smaller array for the server's OS and the larger array for data.

[3s-gtech]

Does the SAS controller support SATA on all four ports? I would definitely look to getting at least two new SAS drives, they'll be more server class and will usually be faster due to increased density, even if they're only 7200rpm ones. Worth the extra - which shouldn't be a huge amount.