Originally Posted by philipw
RAID is really intimidating!

RAID is useful. RAID 10 would be the premium one to go for. Requires 4 drives minimum. RAID is not a backup solution, it's designed to minimize downtime. Rebuilding a RAID 1 array can take a significant amount of time compared to RAID 10. The main reason RAID 10 is preferred to RAID 5 is rebuild times. RAID 5 takes quite a while to rebuild, although it's performance is slightly better compared to RAID 10. For anything above RAID 0 or RAID 1, look into an separate RAID Card with a BBU. It's not that bad. When you're installing Windows, it asks you to indicate the location of the driver. Usually you can use the disc or put the driver on a flash drive, then it recognizes the hard drive and proceeds like a normal installation.

The RAID card has a separate BIOS, where you setup the RAID array. Takes very little time. I went with 4 Western Digital RE4 Enterprise drives 500GB for a 1TB usable space. I see the 137GB Seagate Cheetahs recommended a lot, however I'd have to disagree for SBS. It's simply not enough. MS recommends 120GB for SBS 2011 leaves very little room for Exchange, Sharepoint, etc. They are also quite pricey. Actually, every hard drive is expensive now due to the flooding in Thailand, 200-400% of the original price at the moment and it's not expected to return to normal until around this time next year.

Last edited by sluthra; 11/15/2011 3:01 AM.
Sandeep Luthra | LTMedical.net
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