Hello, I'm looking for some advice on setting up Exchange on a tower-server. I've gone for an HP proliant ML series server and four disks. I've probably gone overboard and got hold of 4 x 146GB disks (10,000 rpm). Might have been better off with 6 x 72GB. The hot-swap bays have a capacity for 6 disks so I went for 4 with the idea of leaving free bays for future expansion. Setup so far: RAID 1: 2 x 146GB drives set as one "logical drive" (physical drive to Windows) RAID 1: 2 x 146GB drives set as one "logical drive" (physical drive to Windows) Windows sees 2 disks. 1st disk: C: operating system, program files, pagefile (20GB) D: Exchange database (110GB) 2nd disk: E: log files (10GB) F: spare (eg for online backup storage) (100GB) A DLT tape drive is on a separate SCSI channel. Now the load may not be expected to be as high as for other organisations. We currently have 40 staff and I would like the server to be able to cope with up to 60. Mailbox sizes will be large (400MB min, 1.5GB max, depending on user). I have used Jetstress to test the configuration as above, and previously as one single drive based on 4 x 146GB disks in a RAID 1+ 0 array. As expected, write latency is slightly improved with 2 x RAID 1 arrays. My thoughts / questions: Any improved performance by moving the pagefile to the second array (same one hosting the log files)? I've recently looked at the possibility of purchasing and installing 2 x 36GB 15,000rpm disks to host the log files (RAID 1 array) but I don't believe this will make a significant improvement in performace. Any better suggestions on setting up my drives using the above 4 x 146GB disks? Any / all suggestions and comments will be most appreciated.
