I know the best practice for an exchange server build is a set of mirrored disks for the os, a set of mirrored disks or raid5 for the transaction logs, and a raid 5 or raid 10 (or even raid 50) for the databases. kind of hard to pull off and retain decent performance when the average server is limited to six das drives... If your using a san or external array thats a different story. Anyways, deploying a new e2k7 build on a 2950 or 2970. Intend on using six disks likely 300gb 15k sas. My question is, would a raid10 across all six disks with partitioning for OS, Logs and DB's be as viable as say, 2 x 73's for OS, 2 x 146's for logs and 4 x 300gb's for the mail stores. I usually just lump the logs on the same volume as the mail store since they are mutually exclusive anyways. In this case we will be doing an ccr to a remote dc. I am aprehensive about splitting up the spindles into 2 x 2 x 4 as we will lose iops that way. How would you approach it?

Anyone with some advise for me?

Iprefer touse separate physical spindles for thelogs and the database.You can search at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/bb412164.aspxfor a similar configuration from a number of users and hardware point of view and start with such a setup.

So what about the OS and Logs on the same set of physical disks with independent partitions and the databases remaining on their own set of 4 physical disks?

Once, I was also given a 2950 server with 6 x 300 GB disks to deploy Exchange 2007. What I did - Virtual Disks/Arrays1. 2x300 GB(RAID1 for OS, binaries & transaction logs)2. 4x300 GB(RAID 10 for database)PartitionsOS & applications = 80GB and Logs=220 GB from 1st arrayDB = 600GB, 2nd arrayIt went well! Hth... -V

Thanks for the information. This is inline with my thinking as well (or the full raid 10 with partitions was my other thought). Since we are going to be tieing the back-end into a SAN next year we are okay with this configuration to get us by until then. The only downside in this case is the lack of a hot-spare.

this is a good approach and it is one that I used in the past.