OS on seperate drive or on RAID

[SychoSly]

I have a system that I want to use as a file server. Currently I have set it up as follows.

I have a 20GB HD with Windows 2000 Server installed. Then I have a RAID expansion card with 2 x 120GB hard drives striped.

Is that a good setup? Or should I get rid of the 2-GB HD and install the OS on the RAID?

Thanks for any help.

 

[FunkStar]

Firstly, its a file server so loading the OS quickly aint that important, ram would improve performance more.

Seondly, Raid striping on a file-server is a really bad idea. I've got all confidence in Raid-0 but it would be alot better to run Raid-1 mirroring or JBOD (seperate) as opposed to striping to give better data integrity. Unless this file-server is catering to lots of different people then just running the hard drives seperately or mirroring would be a good idea.

But once again, i'd run the two 120's seperate and leave the OS on the 20. Striping is good, just not for a file-server unless your running Raid 5+0 (5 or 6 drives) or Raid 1+0 (4 drives)

 

[SychoSly]

Firstly, its a file server so loading the OS quickly aint that important, ram would improve performance more.

Seondly, Raid striping on a file-server is a really bad idea. I've got all confidence in Raid-0 but it would be alot better to run Raid-1 mirroring or JBOD (seperate) as opposed to striping to give better data integrity. Unless this file-server is catering to lots of different people then just running the hard drives seperately or mirroring would be a good idea.

But once again, i'd run the two 120's seperate and leave the OS on the 20. Striping is good, just not for a file-server unless your running Raid 5+0 (5 or 6 drives) or Raid 1+0 (4 drives)

I have a 1GB of Ram.

I don't understand why the RAID 0 is a bad idea. The server is for home use specifically for my brothers which have a lot of Mp3's and movies.

Thanks.

 

[feigned]

I have a 1GB of Ram.

I don't understand why the RAID 0 is a bad idea. The server is for home use specifically for my brothers which have a lot of Mp3's and movies.

Thanks.

Even over a 100Mb hubbed connection, streaming mp3's and/or movies to more than one place is plenty of bandwidth, even theoretically considering the highest MB/s that you will ever see out of said 100Mb connection is 12MB/s...then take in to account that just one of those 120GB drives can pump data out at 50MB/s or mor, I don't think striping them to get burst rates of ~100MB/s is going to get you the results that you wish to obtain.

If you had a Gb connection at home, you wouldn't even be able to saturate the line even with the two 120GB drives in a striped array.

Simply put, RAID 0 for a file server isn't a good idea. Just break them into seperate drives and share them accordingly. The net increase that you would see would not be tangible because a 100Mbps network would hold you back. Gb would give you more headroom but I'm guessing you're not running 64-bit/133Mhz PCI-X GB cards all around the house.

 

[slowbiznatch]

I imagine your brothers would not like it if you instantly lost 240GB of data because you had 1 hard drive fail. A file server without any data integrity is not a file server what-so-ever.