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pagefile for RAID 5?

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5 replies

by flyingknees

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I have a NAS device with four 37GB drives arranged in this fashion:

All disks are Windows 2000 dynamic disks

drives 1 & 2 support a mirrored OS partition
drives 3 & 4 support a mirrored factory partition

for RAID 5, it is implemented using Windows 2000 and sits across all of the drives using equal leftover partitions.

My memory is 384MB right now.

How exactly should I set up the pagefile in this configuration and how should it be distributed?

5 replies

by marc.mawson

so you have 2 logical drives?

drive 0 = 37 GB (mirrored)

drive 1 = 37 GB (mirrored)

which are made up of 4 physical drives (2 for each)

i dont understand where the RAID 5 comes into it?

you have 2 lots of RAID 1, i was under the impression that raid 5 uses a minimum of 3 logical disks (or at least ive thought that for years) in answer to your question i'd put the pagefile on the non boot partition (drives 3 & 4) alwasy try to put the pagefile on a seperate drive. When you say NAS do you mean that you run your OS from your NAS? or do you mean its a server with a few disks in it?

by softcorp.us

Hello...

I don't think it is a good idea to put the OS nor the pagefile on a NAS. Network communications are going to slow down your system even if the network is gigabit ethernet.

I think you should put your OS and your pagefile on directly-attached hard drives. Using RAID-1 (mirroring) or RAID-5 on these internal drives would be OK. But, the pagefile should not be on a volume or volume set that has a lot of other I/O activity for performance reasons, especially if the system only has 384MB of RAM -- A lot of pagefile activity on such a system. If you can, upgrade your RAM to as much as you can afford. It will make a big difference in performance when the system is loaded.

On the other hand, I may be misunderstanding you or maybe you know something new about using a NAS in this way. If so, please share.

Hope this helps...

-----Steve Jackson

CEO/CSA
Software Corporation (Softcorp)
http://www.softcorp.us/probono
Pro Bono Software free for personal use

by flyingknees

This NAS device is Windows Powered and based off of Windows 2000 Advance Server. That was it's out of the box configuration. Looking back it should have been hardware RAID instead of software RAID, but it's a bit late for that I guess.

by flyingknees

no there are a total of 4 physical disks.
These disks are Windows dynamic disks, meaning they are capable of supporting volumes that stretch across the disks.

Drives 1 + 2 have two partitions on them: the first is the mirrored OS and the second partition contains the first "half", if you will, of the RAID 5 set

Drives 3 + 4 has two partitions as well: the first partition is the mirrored factory OS while the second partition contains the second "half" of the RAID 5 set.

Clients store their stuff on the RAID 5 "partition".

by sgt_shultz

I would make sure i had lots of free defragged hard disk space on my system partion and put it there. i would set it up in the default location and for the recommended size. you might get better performance placing it on a separate physical controller. try it and see. think you should add ram at least double

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