Protecting server OS disk uptime

[InorganicMatter]

What's the recommend way to set up a server OS these days in order to protect uptime. That is: fault tolerance so there's no hardware fixing downtime (all the data is being backed up securely). My current home server just has a RAID-1 from the motherboard SATA ports, but some here have advised against that. Surely a single disk is bad - if that goes then the domain controller is down for a whole day while I restore from backup. Should I put it on my RAID-5 array, which runs on a real disk controller? Or maybe create a RAID-1 on the real controller?

Server specs in sig.

 

[DougLite]

Separate RAID-1 (w/ hot spare if you're really serious about uptime) of two smaller drives that hold just the OS, presuming you can spare the spindles on your backplane / storage system. This separates the OS's read/write activities (paging to disk, loading services into RAM, etc) from the disk activity of your server's applications, allows you to simply attach the drive to another system in a disaster recovery scenario, and protects your server's uptime from downtime caused by a boot drive failure.

 

[AreEss]

Anyone advising against putting your OS on a RAID1 should be immediately disregarded in entirety.

This is the standard and how it is done everywhere, period. Doug is overcomplicating it completely needlessly.
Take two drives. Hardware mirror. Done. That's it. That is how it's done. DR is not done by dragging drives, it's done with tape. The rest is needless, pointless fluff that is completely and utterly unnecessary

Two drives. Mirror. Done.
That's it.

 

[Trepidati0n]

Anyone advising against putting your OS on a RAID1 should be immediately disregarded in entirety.

This is the standard and how it is done everywhere, period. Doug is overcomplicating it completely needlessly.
Take two drives. Hardware mirror. Done. That's it. That is how it's done. DR is not done by dragging drives, it's done with tape. The rest is needless, pointless fluff that is completely and utterly unnecessary

Two drives. Mirror. Done.
That's it.

Boggle...hell just froze over. I almost completely agree with what you just posted.

 

[[LYL]Homer]

What AreEss said is how our company's server is setup, with rotating LTO-2 tape backups.

 

[Brahmzy]

As posted, hardware R1. Period. When one of 'em fails, replace it asap. At one point, HP wouldn't ship their servers without this as a minimum required config.

 

[InorganicMatter]

Thank you all for your help. I backed up the existing RAID-5, destroyed it, then reconfigured the volumes. I now have two WD Raptors in RAID-1 for the operating system, and four 500GB disks in RAID-5 for storage, all this on my Intel SAS controller. Windows Server 2008 R2 installed very quickly, runs faster, boots faster, logs people in faster, and is just EVERYTHING faster than the old setup! I'm very happy with it.