RAID INSTALLATION

You ask what RAID level you should install. That depends on what do you want to do with RAID. There should be some documentation with the RAID card you have that would explain how to set it all up. I'm not familiar with the Compaq 7000 series. We use HP NetServers and the RAID card comes with a CD that has the software to set up the RAID subsystem.

You also said you have just installed W2K on the server. The RAID should have been planned and configured before writing anything to the disk system. You will probably wind up starting over.

Since you have three drive of the same size, it would be easy to set them up as a RAID 5 array and data bases tend to work well in RAID 5 systems where you do more reads than writes. Since you lose a disk due to parity with RAID 5 you would have around 36.4 GB of usable space.

If money and disk slots were unlimited, I would suggest RAID 1 for the OS on two additional physical drives and RAID 5 for the database.

You question is a little bit like "what kind of vehicle should you buy?" That depends no how many children, horses, sod, and so forth you want to haul. I know I haven't answered your question, but maybe I gave you some things to think about.

For starters, there are hardware and software RAID. Hardware is usually the best choice. You buy a RAID ctrl and connect your drives to it. The RAID ctrl has an on-board processor to manage the drives. It allows you to create containers on the drives and presents them to Windows as disks. HW RAID can protect your boot partition. HW RAID helps your server run faster because the OS doesn't have to manage the drives in addition to its other tasks.

Software RAID doesn't require anything you don't already have. The Windows disk manager tool can be used to create redundant volumes. Because a SW RAID doesn't work until Windows is running, you can't protect your boot partition.

Mirroring (RAID 1) is a popular choice. The same data is maintained on two disks and if one fails it can be replaced and rebuilt. Performance is generally a little better than RAID 5 but total capacity is lower. With 2 18.2 GB drives in a mirror set you would get 18.2 GB of storage. The 3rd drive cannot be part of a mirror set because there is no 4th drive to mirror it to.

RAID 5 (data striping with parity) is another popular choice. Performance is a little lower than mirroring because data must be read from and written to more disks. Storage capacity is higher, however. With your 3x18.2 GB disks you would get 36.4 GB of capacity [(n-1) x size]

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