It is always easy to spend someone else's money......so here goes. I would not put AD and Exchange on the same server unless it was an SBS server. That is generally viewed as bad. It makes disaster recovery far more complicated and I believe that configuration is not supported or recommended by MS.
That said you don't have enough drives/raid for what you want to do (properly). OS on a mirror set. Exchange on its own raid set, then the store on its own and the logs on their own. File storage on its own raid set. One thing to consider is taking a decent desktop and beef it up and make it your file server. I did that in an office of 65 people in the past and it worked out great. Or get a few more dollars and buy a decent server (nothing fancy) and put AD and the file server on that one machine. From: Aaron T. Rohyans [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2008 9:08 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Domain Controller HD setup Ok folks - question time... Being the "just good enough to be dangerous" type at anything other than Cisco, I thought I would pose this question to the group for some insight. I am in the process of building our new DC. We are a small shop of about 75 employees, so we host AD, Exchange, File Sharing, and BlackBerry Server off of this one server. My question is... how would you guys setup your hard drives in this bad boy for optimal results (primarily for Exchange)? Right now, from the factory it came with 2 x 73Gb SATA and 3 x 146Gb SATA in no RAID. I was thinking of mirroring the 73Gb HDs together for the OS install, but after that I'm not sure what would be best. We have roughly 80Gb of crap that we'll need to store for File Sharing. Any thoughts? Thanks all! Aaron ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~
