RAID

[Guest]

I'm getting a new server with 4 SCSI Hot Pluggable Hard Disks 146GB each.

I need to use 292GB hard disk space for my programs and use the other 292GB
as mirrored. Which RAID is suitable for me?
if anyone of the hard disk fails, my server should not go down.
thanks in advance.

 

[Badger]

If you want to make sure that the server does not go down in the case of a
HDD failure, I would use RAID 5 with your 4th drive configured as an online
spare. This will give you ~292GB of usable disk space for your programs,
and the most fail safe configuration.

This does not however, mirror your drives. If Mirroring is what you would
like to do, use RAID 1.

 

[Guest]

Excellent response given the criteria.

3 disks in a raid5 is a common configuration. Problem with this config will
come down the road when you want to increase disk space. Its a real pain if
you want to increase the OS partition. Not too bad if you want to increase
the data partition.

Whatever you do, DONT ever add a disk to the raid array and then span the
data volume to the additional space as I commonly see posted on the web.
This creats a nonfault tolerant volume on a hardware fault tolerant volume.
I have experienced chkdsk correcting a error corrupt/wipe out the volume set.
FYI

Now if you only had 6 drives you could mirror the OS and raid5 the data with
a hot spare for both arrays. This is a time proven setup and increasing disk
space with either is easier. Best of luck

 

[Badger]

The odd thing is, on my NetWare servers I can add a drive to the array (if
the Smart Array controller has a battery backup) with no problems
whatsoever. Why is it that Microsoft has not made this possible with their
OS?

As I am currently spec'ing a server with about the same config as
insidematrix, I find myself wanting to order extra drives just so I don't
have the problem of needing to add extra volume without losing the RAID 5
benefits.

Thanks for the input Joshua.