RAID 5 vs RAID 10

Y

YeOldeStonecat

[H]F Junkie
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Jul 19, 2004
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Not enough coffee to make up my mind this morning...
SBS Premium server....hosting e-mail for 20 users, storage for 6-8 people in the local office. I originally went with 6x of the 73 gig 2.5" 15k SAS drives...was going to RAID 1 the first 2 for the OS, RAID 5 the remaining for to give roughly 200 gigs of storage for the infostore and "stuff".

She comes back with "You think 200 gigs is enough? We plan on storing lots of pics 'n videos 'n stuff".

Dell rack mount PE 2950 III...she has 8x bays. Should I slap in anutter 2 drives into the RAID 5 array? (more expensive..as the 74 gig 15k drives are 340 bucks each) Or....drop down to 4x of the 146 gig 10k drives and RAID 10 'em for almost 300 gigs.(saving money...as these drives are only 300 buck each)

Adding more 15k drives on RAID 5....
Yeah RAID 10 has better performance...so it should wash off the drop in spindle speed a bit.

The RAID 10 solution with the 4 drives leaves 2x drive bays empty..but AFAIK RAID 10 doesn't leave room to grow right?
 
I dunno, performance is never so big an issue as space. That I've run into at least. Once you hit a certain level of performance, everything else really isn't noticeable. And I don't think 20-30 people are going to notice the performance difference between raid5 and raid10.

I always do raid5 with a hotspare.
 
i say the 10ks seem like the obvious choice... especially when performance wise you could probably get away with less, especially with the drives in a striped array like a raid5

stop worryin :D
 
If you're just using it for a file server, RAID 10 is an overly expensive and unnecessary solution. RAID 5 and hotspare +1 to XOR != OR's suggestion.
 
QHalo said:
If you're just using it for a file server, RAID 10 is an overly expensive and unnecessary solution. RAID 5 and hotspare +1 to XOR != OR's suggestion.
Click to expand...

Agreed - especially if it's just basic office documents/pictures and not anything intensive like data manipulation/analysis.
 
Yeah..well, it's more than just a basic file server...it's SBS....which will include Exchange.

But I guess I'll go with 4x of the slower 146 gig drives in RAID 5 to makeup the data store drive. In a few year if they grow more..can just add a fast NAS box to the cabinet.
 
4 146 10k SAS in raid 5...

You really think performance will be an issue for 20 email users and file sharing for 6-8 people ?


You could use a Pentium III with IDE drives and be completely fine.
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
Yeah..well, it's more than just a basic file server...it's SBS....which will include Exchange.

But I guess I'll go with 4x of the slower 146 gig drives in RAID 5 to makeup the data store drive. In a few year if they grow more..can just add a fast NAS box to the cabinet.
Click to expand...

The Exchange environment that I used to be in was in a cluster with RAID 5 storage and it supported 10k mailboxes just fine. You'll be alright :D
 
Even with Exchange, fast drives and RAID 5 for the number of users you mentioned will do just fine.
 
Agreed here as well. 10k/RAID5. ~300 gigs storage, parity, hot spare. Hard to beat that :)

I used the same on my fileserver, but 400GB 7200rpm SATA drives instead. Works great, love it.
 
QHalo said:
The Exchange environment that I used to be in was in a cluster with RAID 5 storage and it supported 10k mailboxes just fine. You'll be alright :D
Click to expand...


10K mailboxes on Exchange 2k/2K3 ? You eiether have the lightest users i have even seen or you have a massive amount of spindles to pupport that on the back end.

If your big enough to need a dedicated change box you should be speding the money required for RAID 10. RAID 5 requires more IOPS per transaction than RAID10. That is why Microsoft reccoemnds all Exchange databases be stored on RAID 10.

SBS = RAID 5 OK.
Dedicated Exchange box = RAID 10.

Greate read for exchange disk performance/sizing ....
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2004/10/11/240868.aspx
 
RAID 5 with the 10kk RPM drives will be just fine for 20 users on SBS. If you're worried about storage space you could always go with an HP ML370 g5. Room for up to 16x 2.5" SAS drives in one chassis across two cages and controllers. Go with 4x 146GB drives now and when they need more space just pop another one in and expand the array. :D
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
Yeah..well, it's more than just a basic file server...it's SBS....which will include Exchange.

But I guess I'll go with 4x of the slower 146 gig drives in RAID 5 to makeup the data store drive. In a few year if they grow more..can just add a fast NAS box to the cabinet.
Click to expand...

Raid 5 for sbs is fine since you are running the os on a seperate set of disks.

You can always go with a 2900 in rack mount config over the 2950 as well and you can get 2 more drive bays(10 total hotswap with the upgrade that throws 2 bays in the 5.25 inch spaces). Server is a 5u but I dought that really matters in an sbs enviroment. This is with 3.5 inch drives.

Another thing you could do with a 2900 is run it with dual raid cards and put sas in for the os drives(in the flexbay) and have the 8 hot swap bays at the bottem for sata drives. That way you get the preformance of sas for the boot drives and the cheap sata drives for the data. Run the sata drives in raid 5 or 10(10 would be overkill though) and have more storage then they know what to do with. Mind you this type of config is something you would need to quote through a rep. Food for thought.
 
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