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RAID Decisions

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by sselinger 2 views

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I am working for a small office that has a single Windows NT server. The server configured as a NT 4.0 PDC that acts as a file and print server as well as a database server. The server is a dual 400 with 256 Mb Ram. I am looking at upgrading thedisks to RAID. My question is if I should go SCSI or IDE. I realize that IDE would be slower but it is also much cheaper.(this is a concern) I am looking at the 3 ware Escalade 6000 Series Switch RAID controller as a IDE option or a Mylex/Adaptec as a SCSI option. Should I spend the money on the SCSI controller and only run a RAID 1 array? Or should I spend less on the IDE controller but run a RAID 1 for the OS and a RAID 5 for the data? The server only supports 10 users and is already overkill for the network in my mind. The network is two 10/100 hubs which would be switches if money was no object. I am also thinking about increasing the server from from 256 to 756 because RAM is so cheap right now. Should I be looking at two servers ie) a small server to be a PDC and a larger server to be a member server for file/print/database? Please let me know your thoughts asap.

14 replies

by csmith

The choice of RAID 1 or RAID 5 depends on how regular and conscientious the tape backups are. Does this server have a tape backup unit? With good tape backup you can go cheap on the hard drives.
With only ten users the network traffic should not not be that high, unless this is an engineering design firm (Pro-E) , or a graphics/photo editing service.
RAM almost always helps. 256 Meg is low nowadays.
Are you getting a lot of complaints about the network being slow, and how fast is the firm growing? Is the current economic slowdown going to be a factor?
These are the questions that will decide the second server.
We have customers that have not gone to SCSI until after they had six or seven IDE hard drives installed in the server, but they backed up at night. This is not the case for a 24/7 operation.
Regards, Chris

by csmith

If the second server becomes a serious option, I would recommend against the upgrading of the first server. Build the second server with the RAID controller and migrate to it, or do a full data transfer etc. to the second server and do a "server swap". When the new server is fully working and proven, you are then free to work on the original server without the worry of bringing the entire company to a halt.
The most important factor in hard drive life/reliability is the cooling. There are a lot of poorly designed cases on the market. When you get the new case for the second server, make sure there is a way to get proper airflow over the HD array.
Have you looked at the RAID controllers available from American Megatrends Inc.?
These are the same people who provide the BIOSs. Website www.ami.com
Regards, Chris

by dcassat

I would absolutely use SCSI for any drive configuration that you wind up with. If you have ever watched the CPU utilization on a server with IDE drives, I don't think you would need to ask this question. IDE drives take so much CPU bandwidth that only a couple of users can bog a system down, I've seen it! If you are trying to save money you might consider a mirror instead of RAID 5 but don't go IDE. Although the mirror isn't as much of a value, it will be cheaper and you'll have a fail-overconfiguration that can still save your butt. Upgrade the memory but don't go with IDE!

by dcosgrove

What ever you do with the drives, your on the right track with the print server. That would take a lot of stress of your server. Tape backups are also a great way to back up data as they can be stored off site. You didn't specify how many users but you may want to spend the money you were going to spend on ram and put it in higher quality drives. If you look at the life expectancy of scsi drives compared to ide you may actually save over the long term.

by wlbowers

I currently run a 25 user network on a dual PII 400 system with 256 meg of ram. I have 3 cad stations. I just installed 2-10,000rpm scsi drives that I am running in a mirror config. I tape backup as well.

You can mirror or stripe ide but you never will come close to the performance of scsi. A scsi controller takes the workload off of the processor.

What I am using is an adaptec scsi-2 controller with 2 10,000 rpm segates. I am running mirror right out of nt disk admin.

With nightly backups this has been Jake. Except when they turned the ac off in my computer room the weekend of the 4th. (no joke)

If up time is a must look at a controller that will allow hot swaps with auto rebuild of the down drive.

I hope this helps

goodLuck Lee

by nsceml

It seems that we are pretty much in agreement, Go for scsi!! The durability/reliability factor is much greater. I'm sure that your server is critical. I haven't seen a server yet that wasn't critical to "someone" even if it's just the IT guy. IDE raid is fine for a nice fast workstation and with a UDMA array Processor reliance isn't all that terrible but it's still heavier than scsi. Sure add a little more memory, but go with scsi. You can use the drives you pull out that are replaced by the new raid disks and build you a little print server or whatever, but I would free up my workgroup server from that chore. Print serving will bog you down fast

by g.brad warren

sselinger,
Spend the money and upgrade to a SCSI RAID, but save on the HDD cost by using RAID5 on smaller/fewer drives. Use a good backup system(tapes, drive, rotation) to save a mirrored system drive, unless the loss one day's business can outweight the cost of the extra drive. In my company we have a system of nightly backup of only data drives. Since the system drives changes only when new services are install, we use a disk imaging software after the installation to snapshot the drive forfast restores it's only the data we fret over. File/print services can be hung off any box. Adding RAM cam be problematic, when the pagefile.sys grows it may fragment and increase disk activity. I dumped more RAM into my PDC only to have the pagefile fragment and I lost performance overall to disk access overhead. Right now it appears your major concern is the lack of fault-tolerance. If there's a performance issue it's in either the network bandwith or server bottlenecks. Download some shareware network analysis tools to see if network is suffering because of excess collisions, if not skip the switches, they aren't going to help. SCSI RAID will improve disk access, but I would supect the server is overloaded. divide the services to another server. A older pentium or Pentium pro as a BDC/print/DHCP server should boost performance.

I hope this helps,
G.Brad Warren

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