Hard drive Configuration

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Guest

Hello,
I'm going to install Windows Server 2003 on two servers and setup an Active
Directory infrustructure. What is the best hard drive configuration? AD is
going to support about 150 users & used in conjunction w/ Exchange 2003. I'm
thinking the following:
to optimize the speed of NTDS.DIT I put AD on a RAID 5
place the log files on separate disk, configured w/ RAID 10

Is this the best configuration? Please advise.
 
The "best" configuration is the fastest disk array you can afford.

After years of fixing people's broken array, I now recommend against RAID5.

RAID10 is much faster - especially on write operations, more fault tolerant, less demanding on the controller, not nearly as fussy
when it breaks, and with the cost of drives what they are I think it is frankly difficult to justify using RAID5 any longer.

In order to get any benefit from a split RAID5 RAID10 configuration you of course have to have the stripes on separate spindles,
which means you're talking about at least 8 drives (assuming a hotspare.) I'd much, much rather have a single RAID10 with 8 drives
and two partitions than a three or four-drive RAID5 and a four drive RAID10.

Steve Duff, MCSE, MVP
Ergodic Systems, Inc.
 
I agree with you regarding RAID 10. I utilized RAID 10 for a Windows 2003
server running SQL & IIS, after researching. I'm just not sure on a AD
server. So if I understand you correctly you recommend:

1. A single RAID 10 with eight drives each, per server with one being a hot
spare.
2. Two partitions on each server; one partition for Active Directory & one
partition for the log files.

Is this correct?
 
No. For RAID10 you want an even number of active drives. So with a hotspare
you'd have 7 or 9.

There is an odd RAID level (I forget the designation now) supported on some
HBAs such as LSI Logic's Fusion-MPT where you can create a sort-of RAID10 with
any number of drives. The sectors are striped and interleaved with redundancy
as necessary given the total sector count. Fine I suppose, but like RAID5 too
complicated IMHO.

Understand that with 8 drives the likelihood is ~85% that even a double drive
failure before you can swap will not take down the array. Unless your uptime
needs are really extreme, a hotspare may not really be warranted.

Steve Duff, MCSE, MVP
Ergodic Systems, Inc.
 
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