PERC 6/i Raid Partitioning Best Practice

Personally, if the space requirements would permit I'd go with:

- 2 disk raid 1 for the boot drive (C-drive)

- 6 disk raid 10 for the shares/mailboxes/etc

 

If you need more space you could make that 2nd raid set a raid 5.

 

This change would require reinstalling the OS, or you can use an imaging backup tool (e.g. Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image), back up the diagnostic partition and C-drive to a USB drive or network share, then wipe the raid config and re-design it in the PERC bios (initialize it probably a good idea), and then restore the image.

 

If you opt to skip the diag partition, you may need to modify the boot.ini as it'll have a line somewhat like this:

 

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2003" with some possible added entries

 

If you end up with Windows on as the first partition, you'll need to change this line to:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2003" with some possible added entries

 

I usually prefer to add a line like this and modify the description prior to doing the backup. This way you keep the default original line, but also have the option to pick the modified line.

 

If you forget this, or it's not working once you made the restore, get the 2003 CD, boot to it and select to do a repair. Make the choices to get to a command prompt (window). In her try a "fixboot" and "fixmbr", then "exit" and see if on a reboot it'll work now.

Single partition...

Allows viruses/malware to hide and propagate more easily, if the partition is infected, more difficult to clean. Has too many directories, which makes it easy to become disorganized, confusing. If you have a raid 5 failure is this scenario, rebuild time is much longer unless you religiously image the server.  A year ago I walked into a network which was hacked by a professional with a single raid 5 partition...you would not believe how many directories this guy hid executables in , dispersed amongst OS and data directories. Separating/backing up the data to restore the system from scratch  was a nightmare, as the system was the most disorganized mess I ever ran into.    

Leave it the way it is...no way

Divide the disks... the way to go

Having a raid 1 for the OS and the remainder of disks in raid 5 is the safer way to go. Raid 1 is inherently much safer than raid 5, rebuilding the OS is much harder than restoring data (generally). If your raid 1 or raid 5 fails independently, whichever fails does not affect the data/files on the other raid. Having two separate raids gives you separate spindle sets as to the pagefile, temp files, opening/reading/writing of  OS files and data files are independent. Since the creation of two separate raids would reduce the number of disks in the present raid 5, you would get a decrease in speed as to the raid 5, but  overall system speed would be made up due to the separate spindle set of the raid 1. If you have a spare disk on hand for the raid 1, you can pull one of the mirror members, replace with the spare , the pulled disk giving you a  clone of the raid 1 for an almost instant restore.

 

Excellent. Thanks for the advice. I'm going to repartition the array into Raid 1 / Raid 5 pieces. For imaging Norton Ghost won't work with the PERC, but I've had good luck with Clonezilla.

 

Thanks,

Tom

 

refer to the manual , creating VDs starts on page 85

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/storage/Storlink/PERC%206.2/PDF/Dell_PERC6.2_UG.pdf

 

i don't know how to create mirror and riad 0 or 5 in 6 disks on 1 arry controller sata with 6 disks

 

i need to solve this probelm as fast as

i don't know how to create mirror and riad 0 or 5 in 6 disks on 1 arry controller sata with 6 disks   i need to solve this probelm as fast as

Avoid raid 0 like the plague. If 1 drive dies, the data on all drives in the raid 0 is lost. Use raid 1 (mirroring); if 1 drive dies, the other has a full mirror of the data.