I used the Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server Role Requirements calculator and for the databases, it recommended 16 drives in a RAID 10 configuration. For a 4 database design, which of the below approaches do you recommend? 1) Present all 16 drives to Windows as a single basic disk and create multiple partitions/volumes over the single basic disk (1 partition/volume per database). In this situation, all the IOPs are shared among all the databases. 2) Break up the 16 drives into 4 RAID 10 groups and present 4 basic disks to Windows (1 Windows basic disk/volume per database). This would result in dedicated IOPs for each database. Thanks.

I prefer option 1.Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."

Gonna have to watch the batch numbers of those disks in an 8+8 config. Could end up real sticky if the wrong two disks go south. "Ed Crowley [MVP]" wrote in message news:c3e115a4-54ba-43df-9233-cbc0be7b79bf... I prefer option 1. Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems." Mark Arnold, Exchange MVP.

Good point. If you have only one server, I'd recommend splitting a pair of drives off with RAID-1 and dedicating them to the transaction logs.Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."

If we went with the below design, would there still be concern with losing the wrong disks in a 16 disk RAID 10 array? 3 Node DAG (2 Mailbox Servers in Production, 1 in DR, 3 copies of each database) Production01 (2 active databases connected to an HP DAS, 2 passive databases connected to NetApp) Production02 (2 active databases connected to an additional HP DAS, 2 passive databases connected to NetApp) DR01 (4 passive databases connected to NetApp) For the transaction logs, we will have separate 2 disk RAID 1 groups, 1 RAID group for each database (we're using SnapManager for Exchange to backup passive copies)

Every type of RAID has combinations of failed drives that lose data. With a three-node DAG with copies of all databases on all servers, your exposure to disk failure is lower. Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."