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RAID question

S

Soulbane

Member
Can someone clear soemthing up for me in a RAID setup.

I'm working with a consultant from our parent company, and we're setting up 5 servers (all the same). They are all RAID systems.

Now he's instructing me to simply make one huge C: partition in win2k for RAID 5. He says we won't want any other partititons. I'm used to making a C: for all the OS files and then adding a partiton for say file storage or whatever else is needed. In his "instructions sheet" he has printed:

"Never partition a single disk array into multiple partitions, unless required by the application. This makes no logical sense, does not provide a physical benefit, and needlessly consumes drive letters."

Now have I been misled all these years in using RAID? I thought you could make partitions however you wanted with no performace hit or other effects.
At my old places of employment we used RAID all the time and partitioned it however we wanted to.

I'm so confused!
 
It depends on how one sees it. Personally, I would go with the "1 partition == 1 RAID volume" approach. Keeps things cleaner in terms of RAID, and (let's face it) you're not going to be formatting your server around any more than need be, right? 🙂

So having your OS on (say) a RAID-1 and your data on a RAID-5 does make sense. But having OS on one partition and data on another doesn't add any fault-tolerance to the RAID-array and will not really give you any real benefit as I see it. Might "complicate" matters in fact, if you have parallel access to both partitions, but not really a biggie that one. just "accessing different disk areas" really.

Depends on personal preference really - I would go with the 1 partion == 1 RAID volume approach, but I surely wouldn't flame anyone for not doing it. There's worse mistakes ppl can do & argue over 😀.
 
I agree with Shathal. The "locality of reference" arguement for partitioning drives to keep OS and Apps apart really doesnt fly anymore especially in the light of large caches on the HW RAID controllers and the high hit ratios for those caches. Just curious but what RAID card are you using?
 
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