Two questions …

Question to the Storage Advisors: (Jake) I had commented a while back about using an Adaptec card for a home storage server…needless to say changing jobs (not by choice), and Wife going back to school has put that on the back burner. But I figured I would ask anyway because I like to “bench build” things 100 times before I even have the parts in my hands- and I might just learn something while I’m at it.

Question 2: I do a lot of work with NetApp filers – they exclusively use RAID DP on their storage – even when used in a virtual infrastructure. Granted I know that the filers essentially have a HUGE write cache behind them – that being said, in the above scenario, should I use RAID5\RAID6 or RAID10 for the disks that will house t

Jake,

Again I apologise but something cut off your question. However I get the gist of it.

If you have 8 drives in your server you could make any number of arrays. What I’d probably recommend is making a RAID 10 of 50gb or so (whatever you need for your OS) across all 8 drives. That will be very, very fast.

Then make a RAID ? over the rest of the available space on the disks. The ? type depends on data, which is related to your second question.

Question 2 is unanswerable without more information. 5, 6 or 10 depend on your data. Lots of small random reads and writes would dictate 10. Streaming data or good general mix would dictate 5. Paranoia or cautiousness based on general or streaming data would indicate 6.

It all depends on your data as which RAID type is best.

Ciao
Neil