Dark Atheist

anyone here using or has used that option under windows 2003? i think im more than likely going to set up this server to use seperate discs as i have never been a fan of sotfware raid

fitz

I would also, in general, stay away from software RAID. RAID 5 in particular generally has a lot more overhead than a mirror so in a software array, the parity cacls would pull more resources away from the CPU than in a hardware RAID where the processing is done in the RAID controller.

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Dark Atheist

the person whom i am setting up this home server for wasnt too happy when i told him i was using serperate discs, as he wanted raid - told him if you want raid fine, go by a raid card and i'll set it up, if not you can set everything up

LordOfLA

Software RAID doesn't impact modern CPU's enough to worry for home or low-mid level server use.

I haver server 2003 doing software raid0 for my file server at the moment

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Dark Atheist

i have had issues with softraid in the past and seeing as thins is other peoples music videos and pictures im not going to take a chance, i use separate discs on my server then again the most important things are copied onto 3 different pcs so im covered

Terrahertz

Here's a horror story. Some years back we received some 2650 power edges from Dell. Fast forward today our 3 out of 5 of our Fujitsu drives failed [10,000 rpm 78gig-go figure] on two servers [Talk about a bad batch and getting the same shipment on two servers out of that batch]. Found out that the systems shipped with a setup of Raid 0 [Thank the techs at Dell but the true fault lies with IT always check your stuff before deploying]. Funny thing was it didn't matter since we lost 3 out 5 we couldn't build from the array. Whats that you say? Build from our tape backups? lol my good buddy and boss was not running the backups 100% the way they should. It was a nightmare and one I never want to relive. Now running 6 drives on new Dell poweredge/s. No clusters all standalone. 2 drives are OS / 3 raid 5 and one hot spare[Cheetah drives 15,000 rpms 150gigs]. Just woke up and saw this post sorry if Im babbling in the sentences but i just had to tell this story lol.

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Dark Atheist

could have been worse

fitz

you are right.. it doesn't impact it all that much - RAID0 and RAID1 are a LOT less drain though too. RAID 5 has to do parity calcs for every write which does start to impact performace (albiet very slighty). The real hit will be if one of the drives fail, the software RAID5 will be dog slow.. as well as DOG slow when trying to rebuild the array after the drive is replaced.

you don't wipe/reload from scratch as soon as you get it? That's always the first thing I do is wipe and reload with our volume license version.. unless you're having Dell put on your load in which case, you still need to check to make sure it was setup how you wanted it to be

And you can look at RAID6 or RAID10/50 if you want to try to handle multiple drive failures in a single array..

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Sarawu

software raid will make you at a high risk of data loss

Giglesmi

If it is the setup, then dynamic disk is not recommended since it troubles for future disk partition management.

Not safe to resize dynamic disk.