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  • #2082340

    Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

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    by ebott ·

    I?ve got a brand- new Windows 2000 server and a stack of four identical 25-GB IDE hard drives. I?m paranoid about disk crashes, so I want to be sure that I configure them correctly. Should I set up striped volumes? Mirrored volumes? Or choose the RAID-5 option? Should I even be messing with IDE drives?

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    • #3898428

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by yorkster ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      I’d say away from IDE drives if I was building the system, with IDE drives the only way to get fault tolerence is through software,resource intensive & slow, depending on what your using the box for I would select SCSI with a hardware controller that supports raid 5.
      good luck

    • #3898426

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by garrettm ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      If you have to use the IDE drives, setup duplexing…mirror IDE0 disk0 to IDE1 disk0 and IDE1 disk1 to IDE1 disk1. You will loose more of your availible disk space but performance will be better than any higher level of software raid. Your best be is to drop IDE for SCSI and get a hardware raid SCSI controller

    • #3898420

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by Anonymous ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      Get rid of the IDE drives. They have no place in an important server. Sell them, throw them away, use them as paperweights. Doesn’t matter, just get rid of them!

      If you are paranoid about disk crashes then you definately want to use RAID-5 with your new SCSI drives. If cost is a factor (RAID-5 hardware can be real expensive) then you can get by with disk mirroring.

    • #3898418

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by leo.valmores ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      With marginal investment, I would pursue in getting IDE/RAID cards now available and put it in to the new server. (RAID 10, striping+mirror, is likewise supported, and even hot spare drive can even be employed.)

      With it, I would configure to support RAID 1 mirroring.

      I believed that new generation of IDE’s or Enhanced IDEs now can offer better price/performance ratios (for entry-level servers) compared to SCSI-RAID setups.

      If the server is for mission-critical applications, then you’vegot to pay a price for reliability by investing on SCSI/RAID controller + SCSI drives

      If this server is for

    • #3898405

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by msullivan ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      The answer is, “it depends”. What will you be using the server for? I usually start with a mirror set for the system partition. Then create a stripe set with parity using as many disks as I can for important data and critical files. Last but not least, I use any remaining space to create a striped set with no parity or a volume set for temporary files.

      For future refrence, try to stay away from IDE drives for servers, and hardware RAID gives performance benefits over software RAID.

    • #3898401

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by ex dementio scientia ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      If you want to “stay cheap”, and you can spare a PCI slot, get a promise Raid controller card. I’d use the four disks as a stripped and mirrored set. Yes you lose ? your storage space, but it’s safe and quite fast.

      Yeah, SCSI is better, but it all depends on your needs. Do you need 99.999, or can you make do with 99% uptime?

    • #3898400

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by scathis ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      If this is an important server, I’d say use SCSI drives for the shear throughput on the drives. Also switch to a hard ware RAID controller that supports RAID-5. Software raid can only get you so far, what do you do if you lose the OS partition? Also if you’re very concerned about losing a disk I’d only put 3 of the drives in a RAID-5 array and hot spare the last.

    • #3898399

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by rmmcp ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      First of all, if your using more than 2 hard drives it’s best to use SCSI w/controller (2 controllers would be best for performance). But if you want to use IDE you’re limited by the available IDE channels. Don’t forget you’re gonna need a CD somewhere. Setup the CD as the slave on the channel with the Boot/System drive. Seperate the hard drives on individual channels as much as possible for read/write performance. A CD isn’t used much after the initial installs of the OS and programs. After the system is setup, make an initial tape backup of the clean install of the OS and programs. Update this tape only for changes and additions to the OS and programs. Post a Marine guard over this tape.
      For performance gain, take the other 3 and setup a Stripe Set with Parity so that 1 hard drive failure doesn’t have you down and out. Also, during the initial hardware purchase, buy an extra hard drive identical to the others. This way if one fails down the road, you’ll not have to worry about matching your drives with

    • #3898398

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by joncr ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      Given that you have only IDE drives I assume that cost is a big issue. You have no more budget for a SCSI RAID controller and disks which would be an ideal hardware setup.
      I carried out some performance tests with 4 8.4 GB IDE disks under various fault tolerant configurations and found that software RAID-5 (under 2000) has a slight performance boost due but mirroring slowed the disk subsystem by 10-25% approx.
      Given this, You should go with RAID-5 but be aware that the disks are not hot-plugable and there is no fault tolerance if a IDE controller fails as you cannot duplex IDE controllers off the same motherboard. If this is a concern (Extremely less likely to happen than a disk failing) then you should mirror the two disks on the primary IDE with the two disks on the Secondary IDE.
      Given the statistics I would still go with RAID-5.

    • #3898396

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by aleem_quadri ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      You have no more budget for a SCSI RAID controller and disks which would be an ideal hardware setup. I carried out some performance tests with 4 8.4 GB IDE disks under various fault tolerant configurations and found that software RAID-5 (under 2000)has a slight performance boost due but mirroring slowed the disk subsystem by 10-25% approx. Given this, You would go with RAID-5 but be aware that the disks are not hot-plugable and there is no fault tolerance if a IDE controller fails as you cannot duplex IDE controllers off the same motherboard. If this is a concern (Extremely less likely to happen than a disk failing) then you should mirror the two disks on the primary IDE with the two disks on the Secondary IDE. Given the statistics I would still go with RAID-5.

    • #3898392

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by hregan011 ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      Definetly go with raid 5 and if possible pick up a scsi hw based raid 5 controller and scsi disks, will be less headaches in the long run. Also mirroring kills half the drive space available. I also feel its alot easier to rebuild from a crash.. which hopefully never happens but we all know better!

    • #3898391

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by geoff ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      First off, I would question the soundness of implementing four IDE drives in any server. We need to remember that the majority of motherboards only support four IDE devices total, and without adding an additional IDE or SCSI controller for a CD-ROM,it will be very hard to even build the server. Additionally, we are looking at having to potentially backup 100 GB of data (depending upon fault tolerance of course) with no method of attaching tape drives.

      My optimal recommendation would be to install a hardware RAID 5 controller and replace the IDE drives with hot-pluggable SCSI drives and reserve one as a hot spare. Attach a CD-ROM to the onboard IDE controller, and if necessary, a second SCSI card for tape backup devices.

      If budget is a concern, and we are forced to use the available hardware, I would recommend RAID 1 mirroring.

    • #3898386

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by kens ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      I would partition the four drives alike. Each would have a 2.5GB and a 22.5GB partition. I would chain two each of the 2.5 GB partions to create a two 5GB partitions. Then Mirror the two mirror two 5GB partitions for the operating system. Then Iwould strip the 22.5GB partions for data integraty. This would give you a 5GB partition for W2K and 67.5GB of data storage. Good Luck. I have no idea about the preformance. I would like to hear what you get.

      Ken Stephens

    • #3898384

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by disillusionedmember ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      Dump the IDE’s. Go with a RAID card (AMD, AMI, HP, Mylex, all make good cards). Connect the card to a hot-swap chassis using SCSI drives. For maximum capacity, create two RAID-1 (mirror) 25 GB logical drives. For maximum speed & reliability, use3 25 GB’s to create a Raid-5 logical drive and keep the extra drive on-line as a hot spare. For a little extra capacity, use all 4 25’s as a Raid 5 with no hot spare. Keep in mind that applications can be configured to run faster if software/system/data are on separate physical drives.

    • #3898383

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by todd pigram ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      Since all volumes in Win2000 Server are all software based, and the only two that are fault-tolerant are mirrored volumes and RAID-5 volumes I would go with RAID-5. I would also change from basic type to dynamic drives and create a RAID-5 volume set.

    • #3898382

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by arden ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      Most people posting are suggesting to stay away from IDE drives. GOOD POINT! But since you introduced the problem with IDE, let’s talk IDE. One of my favorite solutions is duplexing. I like duplexing for fast, reliable fault tolerance for my missioncritical data. So I would put 2 of your drives in a duplex, the first thing I load here is the OS. That gives us 25 Gb of data storage (less what the OS uses)… we’ll never need any more space than that (where have we heard that before?) Next, I would put your applications on a RAID 0 Stripe set using the last two disks. No need to worry about disk crashes, you have the software on hand to reload should one disk fail. Users get blazing fast (for IDE) performance from applications. Oh, by the way, all of this should be in “Dynamic Volumes” as this is the new Windows 2000 way of handling storage devices.

    • #3898381

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by blocky ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      You mention paranoia about crashes, but not uptime, therefore are you are more worried about data integrity than availability ?. As this is a hypothetical situation (you have four drives and no CD/DVD) then you have already made your choice with regards to hardware (otherwise you would have bought a SCSI controller, drives etc)

      So, with the present hardware, the best way to configure would be a 4 Gb system partition on controller 1 drive 1 , duplexed on controller 2 drive 1. This leaves 4 x 21 Gb free space to create an available 63 Gb software RAID 5 data volume, with no extra cost (but 8 Gb spare space)

      1 2 3 4
      —– —– —– —–
      |SYS| | R | |SYS| | R |
      | | | A | |MIR| | A | —– | I | —– | I |
      | R | | D | | R | | D |
      | A | | | | A | | |
      | I | | 5 | | I | | 5 |
      | D | | | | D | | |
      | | —– | | —–
      | 5 | |FRE| | 5 | |FRE|
      | | | | | | | |
      —-

    • #3898379

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by carlos.martinez ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      I would go with SCSI hard drives and a RAID 5, but if you want to use those IDE drives I would take 2 and create a striped set without parity and the mirror that striped set on the other 2 hard drives. I think this would be a RAID 10.

    • #3898378

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by mrsyence ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      Striped volumes, RAID 0, is used for faster access and don’t offer redundancy so that won’t help your paranoia. Mirrored volumes give you redundancy to qwell your crash jitters but if done in software fail to be redundant for OS files. RAID 5 offers the best compromise between speed and reliability but with just four disks you take a big hit, 25%, in capacity. The best solution is to forget about IDE in the first place because you can only write to one disk at a time. Bite the bullet and spring for five, or better still six new SCSI drives and get a caching hardware RAID controller ad set five of the disks up in a RAID 5 array with one hot spare. This way if one drive fails the spare will come on line and keep you going with only reduced performance while the array rebuils the data on the new drive. Don’t forget to replace that failed drive! SCSI drives can be written to with much lower latency than IDE devices.

    • #3898372

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by bjrani ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      As has been pointed out you will suffer a performance hit utilising a Raid 5 software solution. However this would be slightly offset by the improved read capability of the Raid 5 array. There are two solutions I would suggest, the first is optimised for performance, the second for maximum drive space.
      1: As you can’t have your OS on a Raid 5 volume, utilise one of the 25Gb drives as your OS and application installation drive. Use the W2K Software Raid 5 on the remaining three 25Gb drives to give you a 50Gb Data volume.
      2: Create a 5Gb OS partition on the first IDE drive. Use all four IDE drive to create a RAID 5 volume (maximum size per disk used is now 20Gb, as we used 5Gb for a system partition) giving you a 60Gb data volume. with theremaining 15Gb you can create a volume set for application installation.

    • #3898371

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by none123456 ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      For a server where you’re paraniod about disk crashes, I’d use SCSI. IDE are cheaper however, and may be the only real option if finances are extremely tight. IDE might also be acceptable for a workgroup server or for home use. I’m not an expert in this area, however.
      Definitely do not use striping. This stripes the data across all the disks, increasing read and write performance. It also greatly reduces fault-tolerance, however, as all disks must work for any information to be readable. If any one disk fails, you have to restore from backup.
      Either mirrored volumes or RAID-5 would be acceptable choices. RAID-5 uses striping, but includes a checksum in the process. If any one disk goes down, the data can still be accessed by computing the missing value based on the checksum. Also, having the data spread across multiple disks does give a mild increase in read performance. Write performance, however, because of the time taken computing the checksum. This option works best when implemented in hardware; thi

    • #3898370

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by jbright ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      I would get a Fasttrack Ultra66 Raid Controller for IDE drives, its been benchmarked to run faster that alot of scsi raid controllers, and its cheap and fast. I would also use raid 5 for the setup.

    • #3898361

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by shadowdarks ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      Well, let’s see…where to begin:

      1) You will be limited, with IDE, to the amount of controllers in your system. Usually there is only one primary and one secondary, each only handling 2 drives. This leads to
      2) With 2 drives (even UDMA/66) on the same controller, you will see performance degredation when compared to the higher through-put of SCSI drives/controllers. Which leads to
      3) Finally, when you are talking RAID anything, you are talking more disk access time. RAID 5 would be your best bet for fault tolerance and, if your box supports it, hot swapability if a drive fails, with the ability to rebuild the lost drive’s data from parity. But, again, when writing to multiple disks with parity, the fastest drive possible is still best along with hardware RAID controller(s) verses a software solution.
      Forget striped volumes – no fault tolerance.
      If you’re stuck with IDE, use the SW RAID 5 and get ready for moderate to slow performance.

      Eric Young, MCSE

    • #3898357

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by tonygraf ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      SCSI 2 is better choice with Raid-5

    • #3898339

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by paul.sears ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      Alot depends on your particular application.

      My recommendation is to use RAID 1+0 which is mirroring and striping, if 50G of capacity is enough. Stripe across a set of mirrored disks.

      IDE Drives are ok and are fairly speedy if they are 7200RPM, but there are greater risks of data loss when a bad sector is encountered. SCSI disks can dynamically remap bad sectors, while IDE drives are not as smart. Additionally, you are limited to 2 drives to IDE channel, so you can suffer in performance.

      The best performer would be to stripe across two separate SCSI controllers with 2 disks each, mirrored… and use 10K RPM SCSI disks.

    • #3898255

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by dwayne.evelyn ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      Using IDE, you will require a thrid party raid controller (Promise), Striped volumes will not provide any redundancy but offer faster access. The easiest solution is to run two sets of mirrored drives and this will provide the greatest redundancy, without any additional costs.

    • #3898209

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by philanderson ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      a best practice situation-so it seems….
      IDE is not the best choice that is obvious but we will assume that IDE is all we have to work with by the wording of the question.
      to answer that part NO you should not be messing with IDE HDDs -HDD prices are far to low to cut back in that area any longer.
      secondly-
      I have four HDD to set up Win2k Server with what is the best practice for fault tolerance ?-
      Install Win2k boot volume on the first drive
      put the win2k system volume on the second drive and mirror the boot volume to the third HDD mirror the system volume onto the fourth HDD.
      Mirroring the system and boot volumes to the third and fourth HDD’s will provide ultimate fault tolerance because you can use these mirrored copies to boot to windows or restore data in a damaged volume.
      If one of the disks fails you will always still be able to start windows..

      or you could also . . ..
      Put the server system, boot and data volumes all on seperate HDDs- then mirror the system and boot volumes to the re

    • #3898119

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by chip ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      Using a Promise ATA/66 Fastrak or similar ATA RAID controller, set up 2 drives as a 50gb striped array on channel 1, 2 drives as a 50gb striped array on channel 2, then set up a 3rd array using channel 1 & 2 mirrored.

      That way you get the superior throughput from the striped array (2×66) and the security of mirroring critical data.

      ATA/66 is certainly a cost effective alternative to SCSI, with comparable speed and mtbf.

    • #3898117

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by hgale ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      The Mirrored drives option is your best bet. You have all this equipment, made no mention of doing any upgrades.
      Volumes are lose one lose them all . The way your current system is set up your mirrored volumes and mirrored drives would be the same.
      Raid 5 wouldn’t work because you can’t add your system partition to a raid. So that means you have no recovery option for it.

    • #3898116

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by billp ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      Mirroring would be the choice for maximum redundancy, but you’ll end up with half the usable disk space. Raid 5 would offer acceptable redundancy and consume less space for the fault tolerance. IDE Drives don’t offer some features that SCSI does such as Bad Sector Management at the drive level, but modern operating systems have this in the OS anyway. SCSI drives still have a speed advantage over IDE, and are more expensive, although UDMA66/7200rpm drives give a lot of bang for the buck. If Crashes are your thing, check the MTBF ratings on whatever drives you buy to get the most reliable you can afford.

    • #3899985

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by shanecse ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      You can use IDE drives if you don’t mind the performance hit, which you don’t otherwise we wouldn’t be talking about using W2K built in volumes. If you want complete fault tolerance (paranoia is under-rated) then you will create a mirror set for the system and boot partitions from some of the space on 2 of the 4 drives. To do this, you will install W2K on the first partition (c drive), say 2 GB and after installation then make all of the disk dynamic disks. You do that using the Computer Management snap-ip and the Disk Management utility within that snap-in. Create a mirror volume of the c drive. You would then create a 4 drive RAID-5 array with the available sizes left on the remaining drives. You would store your data on the RAID-5 array. This technique will leave you with some unused space on the 2 disks that contain the mirror which you could combine into a spanned volume if you just couldn’t stand not using every last byte of storage. This technique gives you complete fault tolerance for the s

    • #3789551

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by amieveryours ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      The answer really depends on are you willing to spend more money for speed and fault tolerance or just try to make the best of what you got. If the second choice is your answer then I suggest you go with raid-5. Not only is it fault tolerance but itis also the fastest fault tolerance of the raid that windows currently support. Mirroring with and IDE drive would defintely be a performance problem for your server. But in case, this is still fault tolerance, so it is always good to back all your data up just in case something would happen. Mirror won’t do any good if both set of data are failed.

    • #3739669

      Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      by ebott ·

      In reply to Ed Bott’s Microsoft Challenge–3/9/00

      This question was auto closed due to inactivity

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