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what RAID should I use?

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by flyingknees 1 view

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I am trying to set up a rack mount database server and wanted to find out what sort of fault tolerance to use? I expect a max of perhaps 200GBs in the future. It seems I could mirror the OS using two drives and then leave the rest as a RAID 5 configuration. This is a MS SQL 2000 server with datafiles stored locally. Would there be a significant difference with using Windows 2000 software RAID 5 as opposed to hardware RAID?
Performance issues?

5 replies

by stress junkie

I think that the configuration that you suggested is excellent. Mirror the OS disk and RAID 5 the data disks. This gives the OS a failover and allows the data disks to offer more storage space with fault tolerance.

Generally I would say that hardware RAID is better than software RAID only because hardware RAID offloads much or all of the calculations to place the data on the disks. This leaves the CPU with less work when writing to the disks. If the server is busy then offloading work from the CPU is always a good idea. Plus, it may make configuring the OS a bit simpler. If the hardware RAID does all of the work then the configuration that you mentioned should look like two disks to the OS. Some hardare RAID shares the work with the CPU. This will be trickier to configure but should still help performance.

You should always question the source of advice. I've worked in the support business as a server system administrator for 20 years and I've worked with RAID configurations a lot.

by crawfordr

Hardware raid is a Must, been that you will be a faster rebuild speed. Now as for storage Issue, if you need total storage u would advise you to go with raid 5. But if your main concerned is READ/WRITE then i would say Raid 1

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