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I am about to set up a new server running SBServer 2011. The server will be the domain controller, file, web, exchange, antivirus (sophos), print, backup server - approx 30 users plus maybe 50 on the website.

I have eight drives, and will either go for RAID-5 or RAID-10.

I will be doing daily backups to USB drives, but will do monthly backups to the server drives (used only for if someone needs to restore something deleted months ago).

How should I work the array (one huge array or split it?) - Would it be beneficial to split into 2 arrays so the backup job runs from one set of drives to the other?

And any suggestions for partitioning? I am tempted to leave it as a huge C drive unless someone tells me that is a terrible idea in some way!

James Holland
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A good part of it will come down to your comfort level vs. budget. At the very least, you may want to consider segmenting the OS/applications vs. the data. That can open up the backup options along with its associated costs.

user48838
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Also bear in mind you can partition a raid set and that generally the larger the raid set the bigger the benefits of raid (bar the likelihood of disk failure). I personally would say one large raid 5 would do the job nicely, exchange has been adapted to work on inexpensive storage nowadays and even a sata raid 5 is up to the task. One thing to bear in mind when creating it though; if your array is over 2TB you will have to go in to your bios and enable uefi if it's supported on your server, which will in turn enable GPT partition table booting. Once this is enabled then windows installation will automatically initialize the disk as GPT rather than MBR. If you don't do this you'll find your single array will be unpartitionable beyond 2TB and you'll have to reinstall SBS (take my word for it, I spent the best part of a morning installing SBS on an MBR disk to figure that one out!).

With regards to partition I usually do a relatively small sized partition for the OS (say 100gb) and then split the rest 50/50 for shares and exchange storage. This doesn't necessarily help with backup as such but it does mean that should anything happen to your OS your mailstore and shares are protected and vice-versa, it will also make defragmenting your exchange database that little bit easier.

Alex Berry
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  • Thanks for the advice! I ordered the thing with 8 drives in RAID-10 but I think, I'm definately going to change it to RAID-5. Will I have to Rebuild from scratch, or can you change RAID levels somehow? – James Holland Jun 20 '11 at 20:20
  • Only enterprise storage solutions really support RAID level changes without erasing data, more than likely you'll have to delete the set and recreate it, then reinstall. If it's OEM hopefully they send you a disk, if not you can always do a backup and restore, however again if you're doing the backup and restore route you'll want to check the current partition tables (MBR or GPT) to make sure your new raid size isn't wasted. – Alex Berry Jun 20 '11 at 22:42
  • Would you mind selecting the answer as solution if you found it useful? – Alex Berry Jun 24 '11 at 12:54