Boot Partition Size

Question

Any limits on the boot partion or is there a best practice for this.   I am installing Server 2003 standard r2 on a 2950 with a perc5i controller,  I have 6 Hard drives, broken down into the following setup.   146GB 15K  Raid 1 146GB 15K  Raid 1   146GB 15K  Raid 5 146GB 15K  Raid 5 146GB 15K  Raid 5 146GB 15K  Hot Spare   I was going to make the Raid 1 my boot partition, dell utities partion and the raid 5 my data partition.  Should I allocate all the extra room on raid 1 to the boot partition?   Thanks Matt

pcmeiners · Answer

For the boot partition and all the program files 10-15 Gig is being generous. You might also create a small partition for the page file. With the safety of raid 1, personally I would leave the hotspare non global, dedicated to the raid 5. The 146 gig for the raid 1 is huge, I would place all 'install' disks, utilities etc on the raid 1 also...2 (36) gig disks would have been more than enough.

JCCollins · Answer

Any limits on boot partition size? Yes, I'm sure but it's well into the Tera byte range on Windows Server 2003 Standard and Enterprise Editions.

Best practices? How many folks on this forum?

With the the configuration you have you could have a 584 GB C: drive with one hot spare. That would best utilize your hardware.

We have a PE 2950 with six 300 GB drives with one hot spare. The c: drive is just over 1 TB.

You can partition if you want but I think that is old school these days and doesn't buy you anything either performance wise or reliability wise. Keeping it all one drive just makes it simple.

Putting the swap file on a different "physical" drive that all that drive does is host the swap file has proven to have some advantage because you can turn off anti-virus on that drive but doing that on a partition on the same physical drive is just a waste of time. It doesn't buy you anything.

Regards,

John

PowerEdge HDD/SCSI/RAID

Boot Partition Size

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