Re: Upgrade raid for disk bottleneck?

"RAID5 for everything" setup is so bad, it is not even funny - RAID5 is very slow at writing. Exchange performs write twice for every write op - to the logs and to the database, which incurs much more disk ops (as compared to single drive or mirror). This leads to your high latencies.

For your new setup I would suggest either two RAID1 volumes (with hotspare) - one mirror for OS+pagefile+Exchange binaries+ Store, the other for logs.
Alternatively you can go for RAID0+1 (with hot-spare) - this will give allow you to have single partition, but will cost you some disk performance.

In order to decide between SATA/SCSI and 10/15 Krpm drives you need to measure disk IOP/s during peak hours. If it is above 100 IOP/s then you better choose high performance drives. For my 40+ users 2 RAID1 one volumes with SCSI 10Krpm drives are more than enough.

Chris Baldassano wrote:
Here is my current setup:

Dual Xeon 2.8 Processors
4 Gig Ram
Windows 2003 Standard
Adaptec 2410 SATA Raid Controller
4 Western Digital 2500JB (250 Gig) 7200 RPM 8mb Cache Drives
Raid 5 Setup
4 Partitions (C, D, E, F)
C - OS
D - Exchange Database
E - Log Files
F - Exchange Defrag Space and Other Misc Junk (lol)


Our exchange server has been suffering from high latencies for some time... It goes in and out. I have seen that outlook box enough to remember it verbatin "Trying to retrieve data from Mail2k3"...

Here is my question.. Our radi setup is now at least 4 years old, and was put in by an outsourcing company before i arrived here...

I want to upgrade the disk subsystem. There are 2 options.

Upgrade the controller to the 2820SA and replace the 4 7200 drives with 6 10K Western Digital Raptor Drives (16 meg Cache) which should give me "enterprise" class drives with excellent speed and hopefully eliminate the bottleck of the file system (In either raid 10, or Raid 1+0) I would imagine

Or go the SCSI route with 15K Rpm Seagate Cheetas.

The scsi option is obviously More $, as the controller is more expensive as are the drives...

The WD's would run me $300 a peice, $500 for the controller.

Im looking for feedback.

Oh, also we have approx 50 users.


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