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Best setup for system drive?

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6 replies

by haydenh

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I have a Dell PE 2900. I am wondering the best way to setup a system drive? I have 2, 250 GB that I've bought for some type of configuration for the system drive. Should I just use 1 drive and Ghost it for backup/recovery or should I do some sort of RAID (5)? Thank you in advance!

6 replies

by markp24

Hi with two drives I would recommend a Mirror (raid 1) if you had 3 or more then i would do a Raid 5. There are performance differences on the raid types,
raid 0 with 2 drives is faster than raid 5, but no redundancy just one bigger drive,
Raid 1 (mirror is great, but you sacrafice drive space.)
Raid 5 allows redundacy and space, but you need min 3 drives for that.

by haydenh

Yes, I have 3, 2TB drives that I am going to do a RAID-5 for everything other than the OS.

Is it really necessary to do a RAID configuration on a system drive? Will I actually see performance increases? I really want the redundacy but I want to make sure that use a RAID configuration is the way to go.

by stalemate

Using any RAID configuration for redundancy (RAID 1=mirroring, RAID5, etc) will cause a decrease in performance but it is negligible compared to the peace of mind they offer.

The only RAID setup that would increase speed is RAID 0 = stripeset, but if one of the drives fails your data is gone. I speak from recent experience. It was a gaming machine, so no harm done.

If your motherboard / BIOS / RAID card allows it, it might be possible to do a 1+0 RAID, where 2 mirrors are in a stripeset. The downside is ... this requires 4 identical disks to set up.

The recommendation to use a RAID 5 for your data is spot on, and for a machine that is deemed "critical", a mirrored system partition just makes sense, despite a slowdown in read/writes.

by markp24

Its not necessary, but for me, on a server I prefer to have 99.9% uptime , if you get a bad sector or drive failure, you will at least still have the server up and running and after hours you can swap the drive (depending on hoe long it takes to get one and if your chassis supports hot swapping a drive or not) All my servers are hot swap, and we configure them to have a raid 1 for the OS partition and a raid 5 for the data partition, (some special servers (running SQL) we have a Raid 10)
( refence http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/raid5-vs-raid-10-safety-performance.html)
(http://www.prepressure.com/library/technology/raid)

by haydenh

That's exactly what I needed. I will do RAID-1 for OS and RAID-5 for DATA. I really appreciate your suggestions. I will have to order another drive for a spare :)

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