Server disk setup

[Simcfc73]

I have just had a delivery of my new server

 

Its a Poweredge T710 (thanks to CP-ltd) and budgets kept me to 6 SAS 150Gb drives. its going to be running Sims in a Hyper-v and eventually a few more Hyper-V servers... nothing major to start with.

 

How would you set up the disks? I was thinking of Raid 1 for the Hyper-V server then Raid 0 for the other 4 disks giving me 2 disks to play with?

 

I have read lots of different opinions on this but thought I would ask you lot as you have bigger setups than I will ever have.

 

PS. Its a gorgeous server, love the airflow tunnel inside and the SAS drives sitting at the front... people here think I am sad cos I got very giddy

[Michael]

Hmm well seeing as you have so many disks I would setup RAID1 for Hyper V and RAID5 using the remaining four disks.

[john]

Agree with RAID1 for a pair and RAID5 for the rest Thats how I do mine

[SYNACK]

As they are all the same speed disk you will almost certainly get better performance and storage area if you just chuck the whole lot into a RAID5 or 6 then split it using partitions. Given the sheer number of spindals you will end up with a better usage pattern because the speed can be shared more efficiently.

 

I would stay away from RAID0 unless you have another identical server to mirror the first one on to for reliability. If you are really after speed with solid redundancy you could use RAID1+0 but this would eat half your capacity.

 

With RAID5 you would have the same storage as your original proposal but would have redundancy for one drive across the lot rather than just the one. RAID6 would loose two drives to redundancy but would allow for two drives to fail.

 

Using two seporate arrays on the controller actually puts a bit more load on the controller slowing it down very slightly and ties you in to strict sizes for OS/DATA where as a single span can be dynamicly allocated more efficiantly to fit your actual needs. The extra spindle count also means a speed boost as the data is spread out across more drives. You can even make it look like seporate custom sized drives to the OS if you really want.

Edited January 26, 2010 by SYNACK

[Simcfc73]

I was tempted with Raid 1+0, theres still plenty of space if I lose a couple of disks.

 

Raid 5ing them all just seems so 1990 did it on my first server build back then.

 

Think I will mirror 2 drives for the OS so I can change the Raid on the other 4 drives.

 

Probably flip a coin and chose 1+0 or 5.... although I do need to check the controller does them both.

[Michael]

I'd only use RAID0 if you're not bothered about possibly losing any data. There are few applications really where it's useful, but you're right RAID1+0 would work too.