RAID options

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From: mthornal (noone_at_nodomain.net)
Date: 11/25/04 

Date: Thu, 25 Nov 2004 10:19:07 -0000

I was wondering if anyone could offer some guidance in how best to configure
the RAID arrays on a new server that will be built to run Windows SBS 2003.
The motherboard (Intel SE7501BR2) has a single Ultra 320 SCSI channel and
there is a hardware RAID controller (Intel SRCZCR) plugged into the
motherboard that uses this channel. The configuration options on the RAID
card are pretty comprehensive and I think will enable me to configure the
drives into any number of RAID configurations. The chassis (Intel
SC5200HSRP) can be configured with up to a total of 10 SCSI disks in 2 hot
swap cages all driven from the single SCSI channel although currently we
have only 1 cage with 4 73GB disks.

Initially I was going to simply configure the 4 73GB (10k rpm) disks we have
into a single RAID 5 array. Although now I'm thinking that that isn't going
to provide the storage capacity that we need and hence if I'm going to need
to buy some more disks which should I buy and how should I configure them.
Performance is the priority and if this is likely to be significantly better
by using a RAID 1 pair for the OS and then a RAID 5 set for the other files
even though there is only a single SCSI channel then I would certainly
consider that.

The other thing to consider is that on the boot host disk there needs to be
a non NTFS service partition for motherboard maintenance therefore this disk
would need to be a basic disk. If a second host disk was configured as a
RAID 5 array then this disk could be a NTFS dynamic disk and as our storage
requirements grew new physical disks could be added to the array to increase
capacity and the dynamic disk could just be extended (at least that's the
theory).

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks,
M.

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