are there any risks in housing your mailbox database files on the servers system drive (c drive)? do microsoft have any best practice guidance on whether this is good practice or should be avoided? I seem to recall they warned against storing the log files on the system drive, never seen anything about the database itself however..

Best practice

You really should not place your databases on the System Drive.  The reason being typically on a system drive you do not have any redundancy like RAID on the back end.  Plus you already have the OS/Page File and other operations hammering the drive.  You really want to give the Exchange DB it's own drive.  Depending on your configuration you can even colocate the logs and db on the same volume.

In exchange 2013 servers, the best practices would be always have databases on separate drive, log files on separate drive, and exchange binaries/system files on separate drive.  Yes, we have risks if you have mailbox database on same drive where system drive.  According to your mailflow, your database size will increase, so we need to give some room.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-in/library/ee832792(v=exchg.150).aspx

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd346703(v=exchg.141).aspx

there seem to be a number of logfiles associated with exchange, which log files specifically are you referring to pease rajkumar?

thanks

In exchange 2013 servers, the best practices would be always have databases on separate drive, log files on separate drive, and exchange binaries/system files on separate drive.  Yes, we have risks if you have mailbox database on same drive where system drive.  According to your mailflow, your database size will increase, so we need to give some room.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-in/library/ee832792(v=exchg.150).aspx

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd346703(v=exchg.141).aspx

Not entirely true.  If you have a highly available setup (in other words a multinode dag with multiple copies of the databases) it is recommended to Colocate logs and databases on the same volume.  

With that being said you should always test the volumes you plan on using to make sure they meet the proper requirements using a tool like Jetstress.  

there seem to be a number of logfiles associated with exchange, which log files specifically are you referring to pease rajkumar?

thanks

What we are talking about here are the transaction logs for the database.  Here's some more information on what the transaction files actually do.

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/Exchange-transaction-log

Hi,

It's recommended to place databases on separate drive. If you have a risk of running out of disk space, you can perform full bakcup on Exchange database, this will truncate transaction log files and free space.

Best regards,