Drive configuration Best Practices

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Hello everyone,

Several years ago I was told by different hardware vendors and Microsoft
that the following was the correct way to handle drive configurations. For
this discussion, I'm going to use round numbers, but you will get my point.

Let's say we have three 80GB SCSI drives and we want raid 5. We want a
system (C:) partition of 20 GB, another partition for user data and quotas
at 30GB and the remaining 30 for data. This is how we'd normally do it.

Create these three partitions via the RAID controller and install the os,
format the other two volumes and away we go.

We've been able to, rebuild the OS on the first partition (when trouble
happens) without disturbing the other two. I had an SBS 2000 server fail
one time and I took the opportunity while it was dead to install SBS 2003
when rebuilding and because all the data was there, I was able to mount the
original 2000 exchange databases and connect user accounts seamlessly, the
server upgraded the database for me. Nifty, eh?

Anyhoo, we recently had to seperate servers have their backplanes fail in
such a fashion that they rendered the systems useless. Both times the
hardware vendor told use NEVER to partition our drives as I mentioned, but
to have the RAID controller create one volume and use Disk Management (MS)
to chunk up the disk space. Two different reps told us this. I'm thinking
that I'm loosing some functionality of my RAID controller and that my OS
will take a performance hit because the RAID is not handling this stuff.
What gives?

How do you guys create and manage your volumes?

Thanks much,

Nick


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