Re: Upgrade raid for disk bottleneck?

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Both excellent responses and thank you.. Let me tell you what im lookin at
and what I have done thus far and tell me your opinions..

I am going to change the raid setup, controllers, and drives.. I ordered:

Adaptec 2820SA
6 Western Digital Raptor-X 150 Gig 10,000 RPM 16 Meg Cache Drives.

Now that card supports (from adaptec site)
-- Eight ports support up to eight Serial ATA and Serial ATA II drives
PCI-X 64-bit/133 MHz host interface (3.3 volts only)
Standard Features: RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, 50, hot swap, hot spares, Online
Capacity Expansion, RAID Level Migration, Optimized Disk Utilization and the
Adaptec Advanced Data Protection Suite with RAID 1E, 5EE, 6, 60 and Copyback
Hot Spare
Optional Feature: Snapshot Backup
Half-size PCI form factor
RoHS compliant
Optional battery backup module

Now I am not a raid expert, but im lookin at not doing a full reinstallation
of windows and exchange and all.. I would like to keep the same directory
structure I have now, restore my acronis image of the server onto the new
raid setup, and then move files around if i have too, saving me HOURS of work.

That being said, you say the best setup is a raid 1 with Hotspare volumes.
My server currently being the raid 5 is 1 whole volume subdivided to 4
partition segments, i would assume you mean create 1 array per drive letter
(1 for C, 1 for d etc)..

Or can i create the Raid 1 array, restore the image which will create the
partitions automatically, under 1 large raid 1 system.. ( I can create
multiple arrays as well and restore individual partitions to the arrays)..

I hope im clear on this..
Chris Baldassano
--------------------
Network Administrator
Simon Paston & Sons Agency
Lynbrook, NY


"Kirill Palagin" wrote:

"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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