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I have a new Dell R710 server with 6 hard drives, 2x146GB and 4x300GB. I am installing windows server standard 2008 R2.

Dell recommended a system partition of 146GB in Raid 1 using 2 drives and 600GB in RAID-10 using the other 4. Is this a good configuration?

I am inclined instead to use a 746GB configuration with all 6 drives in RAID-10.

What are your thoughts?

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2 Answers

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It Depends. :) Your most likely useful scenarios will be to use the 2x146GB in RAID 1 pair for the system partition, but then either build two pairs with the other drives or build them all into one 1+0 array. A scenario where you'd put them all into one 4 drive array would include something like a file/storage server where you have random read/writes and want to maximize space capacity. A scenario where you might not want to do that could be an application or database server where you want to separate the code from the text logs (web server) or data files from transaction logs (database server) in order to increase performance by separating different types of traffic.

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up vote 4 down vote

No, don't use RAID 0 anywhere you care about, it's a bad, bad, BAD idea.

It depends what you're using your system for but either 6-way R10 config you mention or a 2 disks R1 + 4 disks R10 config is likely to be good for most setups.

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+1. The only other option I'd consider, if you don't care about performance and need more space, put the 4x300 disks in a R5 array. – Chris S♦ Dec 9 '10 at 15:46

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