Raid advise

I am using a dell T300 with raid controller and 4 hard drives, my current config is all 4 as raid 5 with no hot spare. OS SBS 2003 r2 premium and shares are all on the raid 5 setup in seperate partitions.

C OS
E Shares
F CommitCRM Data

How often do you see a raid 5 setup lose 2 drives?
Is it better practice to have 3 drives as raid 5 with 1 as hot spare?

any advise would be appreciated.

Raid is pretty reliable, although i stopped putting my trust in it years ago. Too many problems recovering, and getting back running.

IMO, raid is not a backup solution. It is a high availability solution. You can end up with many many drives, and still have issues.

We have found that it is best to build your base servers with 5 drives at the bare minimum. The OS drive is a pair of drives in a RAID1 and the DATA drive is the other 3 drives is a RAID5 .

When you setup a server on one physical array and create seperate logical partitions, you run the risk of causing drive "thrashing" which can cause the drives to fail prematurely. You also introduce extra latency to the equation because all of the partitions are on one physical array and both the OS and the applications are going to be trying to read from this array at the same time.

Good Luck.

I wanted to have a 5 drive arry system but cash was a problem at the beginning of the business so setteled for 4 drives

as you say my ideal soloution would be raid 1 OS and raid 5 data my first choice also.

however to deal with the problem of only having 4 drives would you suggest then that I remove partitions and then have OS and data on a single raid 5 array partition using 3 drives to reduce thrashing and have 1 as hot spare or use all 4 for the raid 5. Data is backup reguarly every hour to a NAS raid 1 using Goodsync (Great program) so worst case senario of loosing the raid totally is rebuilding the server OS and software then transfering the data back across the network which is what i would have to do anyway to reconfigure the server.

btw if it all goes belly up no comeback lol

in advance thanks for input already

while i am here would bet intrested in any offer of a OS swap SBS 2003 R2 premium for server 2003 standard / 2008 standard as all I need is a simple file server with AD

I have server 2008 standard OEM for sale.

We purchased a box with it, but we installed 2003 from our action pack instead.

I'm a RAID5 to RAID 10 convert. RAID10 is generally considered higher performance, can survive multiple drives failures under some circumstances, and requires less horsepower on the RAID card.

Nattivillin would you like a straight swap of software both priced about the same. or mail me to keep chat out of forums :-)

email me

custompc -at- icustom-pc.com