Disk configuration on a new server

[NortonES2]

Hi, we are buying a new server with 6 hot plug disks and I was wondering what was the recommended configuration for this. I was thinking of 2 x 18Gb as RAID 1 for the OS + pagefile and 4 x 72Gb RAID 5 for the database. Any thoughts as to where the log files should be stored?

All ideas welcome

Many thanks.

 

[brontosaurus]

In an ideal world, you'd have the logs on a separate disk from the databases. I suppose it would be fine to put them on the OS drives...

 

[NortonES2]

Cheers, I was thinking along these lines though it's always good to have confirmation.

 

[georgesz]

I would have the log on RAID1, and the databases on RAID5. The email transactions are written from RAM to the log files first, and then there is a lazy-write operation from the log files to the databases. So it is important for the log drives to be very fast, and writing data seems to be faster to RAID1.

It's importand to have quite a bit of space on the log drives as well. In case your Exchange backup does not run for a few days and you have a lot of mail traffic, you can fill up that drive with logs in a hurry.

Georgesz

 

[jefblack]

Georgesz is right on the mark.

 

[tekistry]

I hate fat32, but for best performance on this type of read/write operation it is faster.
(But I still have my logs on an NTFS drive)

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