Plenty of good advice in this thread, I might add that you'd wish to use the maximum number of disks you can pack into your box and meet your storage requirements, and not just a few big ones, favoring RAID-6 over RAID-5. Usually striping a busy DB over more individual disks will yield added performance benefits, smaller disks rebuild quicker too in case of failure and are cheaper to replace. The increase in disks does increase the risks of RAID failure as well, but using RAID-6 plus hotspares helps minimizing that. Rebuild is the most critical moment in RAID-5, especially with those newer huge disks that take ages to rebuild. Rebuilding a busy 500Gb SATA RAID-5 took about 8 hours, but YMMV. During rebuild the load is increased on all the remaining disks, and as they usually are from the same batch as all the others, they may fail for the same reason the first one did. I had a big RAID-5 die on me during the rebuild phase, and that is not a happy memory. Thankfully we had some spare drives to rebuild a new array and full backups. If money is really no object, go buy a couple ramsan's (http://www.ramsan.com).
_______________________________________________ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
