Tom Brown wrote: > Hi > > I wonder what people think for a RAID level for their mail stores? > > I can only have RAID 1 or RAID 5 and i dont have many users ~500 so what > do people think? This will be on a hardware RAID card but the RAID > channel will not be dedicated to the mail store ie there will be another > RAID disk sharing the channel. > > Just want to lay the spindles out 'correctly' > > thanks > >
We consider RAID1 a practical necessity. Not just for mailstore, but servers in general - anything but a laptop, really. - with current HDD sizes - very affordable 500 GB, 750 GB, even 1 TB there is not as much need for RAID5 unless you have a truly massive storage need. - RAID1 (usually) reads faster, isn't all that much slower on writes, given that they are usually buffered/background - even aged or 'lazy' writes anyway. It is also easy to implement with anything from top-end 'hardware' controllers thru el-cheapo psuedo-RAID or even all-software - one or more 'flavors' of such being supported by most OS. - RAID5, OTOH, really should have a good 'hardware' controller, and it is not easy to cost-justify the better ones vs the 'waste' of rather cheap HDD needed for a RAID1 mirror. In either case - don't neglect backups. RAID cannot protect against fire, theft, malicious damage, controller or driver foibles - or more commonly - a mere lapse in attention that mirrors a new, blank HDD onto the one with good data instead of the other way 'round... :-( Bill -- ## List details at http://lists.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/exim-users ## Exim details at http://www.exim.org/ ## Please use the Wiki with this list - http://wiki.exim.org/
