Recommmend a RAID controller for Server 2008 \ Exchange 2007

[gshaw]

Just building up the Exchange 2007 box at the mo, it's been sitting in the rack for quite a while and so far it's got...

 

Opteron 265 (dual core dual CPU)

8GB RAM (could be expanded to 16GB if needed)

2 x 74GB disks to be RAID1 for OS

2 x 320GB disks for Exchange Logfiles (RAID1)

2 x 320GB disks for Exchange Mailboxes (RAID1)

 

In an ideal world I'd have more disk slots and go for RAID10 with more disks but can't have everything I guess; heard performance with RAID5 on 2007 isn't great plus I wanna keep the logfiles split from the data for performance...

 

Looks like it's going Server 2008, however there's no drivers for it on the SuperMicro site (wish the servers were HP ) so looks like I'll have to dig around AMD for the chipset ones and go from there.

 

Also gonna get a 2 or 4 port Intel NIC to team the ports up as well I think.

 

RAID controller is some onboard jobbie that prob isn't supported so will need a new one, best to have the battery backup, caching etc so was wondering if anyone's got a decent recommendation that's Server 2008 OK. Needs to be low profile as well as it's going in a 2U server.

 

Any ideas?

[SYNACK]

You could look at one of these HP Smart Array P400 Controller (405132-B21) specifications - HP Small & Medium Business products

I havn't directly tried it under 2008 but it flys along mighty quickly in our new dl380. Supports SAS/SATA and you can upgrade the cache to make it faster, we currently have it with 521mb BB cache.

[gshaw]

Frogot to mention... being used with a SCSI U320 backplane:p