For 100 users and cost being an issue you don't need to separate the OS and logs on separate drives. Likewise, you don't really need two controller cards, but you'll get better performance with a modern card than you'll get with the on-board SCSI controller, so use one card at least.
Ed Crowley MCSE+Internet MVP Freelance E-Mail Philosopher Protecting the world from PSTs and Bricked Backups!T -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Erick Thompson Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2005 3:18 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: Hardware recommendation for Exchange 2003 Thanks for all the feedback! I have a better idea of what setup to have. Seeing as I have 4 drives slots on the DL380, I'm going to go with the following configuration. Internal cage 2 x 36 drives for OS, binary RAID1 2 x 18 drives for logfile, RAID1 External cage 1 x 9 drive for swapfile 4 x 36 drive for store, RAID5 + hot spare If I have two controller cards, I would use one for internal cage, one for external cage. That should give a good balance between the two systems. This seems like it should give me a nice balance of speed and redundancy. Hopefully this will keep future downtime to a minimum. Any thoughts? Thanks, Erick -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of User, IS (PHES) Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2005 2:02 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: Hardware recommendation for Exchange 2003 I disagree unless you have lots of spindles on that Raid5. the Disk IO shoots up quite a bit putting the logs and the stores on the same "Physical" raid. Bob -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Aristotle Zoulas Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2005 3:58 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: Hardware recommendation for Exchange 2003 Personally: Raid 1 for OS Raid 5 for Exchange---->multiple ligical drives for db/logs/etc.. ***Many smaller drives is better than fewer bigger drives*** If you "HAVE TO" stay with that machine, you may consider Raid 0+1 -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Erick Thompson Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2005 4:08 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: Hardware recommendation for Exchange 2003 After a day spent without email due to a corrupted database, we're making changes to our Exchange 2003 setup. At the moment, we have a Compaq DL380, dual P3 866 with 2 gigs of RAM. There are four drive slots, with 4 36 gig drives, all set up together as a RAID 5 with a hot spare (72 total space). We have about 100 users (very heavy email usage), and are running a SharePoint portal site on the server as well. The system is heavily IO bound at the moment, so I need to do a drive reconfiguration. We're a non-profit, so I'm trying to keep hardware costs low. For Exchange 2003, do you think it would be better to have 1) Two RAID1 arrays, one for OS + Exchange + database files, and one for swapfile + log files 2) One RAID1 array with a hot spare for OS + Exchange + swapfile + log, and an external RAID5 array for database files 3) Same as #2, but with a RAID5 array instead of RAID1 4) Something else? For SharePoint, I'm thinking that a external RAID5 array would do the job, as the SQL Server backing SharePoint is what is causing the most problem. I'm trying to get the best uptime, followed by the best performance. Thanks for any help, Erick _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Web Interface: http://intm-dl.sparklist.com/read/?forum=exchange To subscribe: http://e-newsletters.internet.com/discussionlists.html/ To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe via postal mail, please contact us at: Jupitermedia Corp. 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