One for IT guys

[moltuae]

Well, firstly I wouldn't bother with RAID 5 even if it was an option. RAID 5 pretty much became useless several years ago once drive capacities began exceeding 2TB:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-rai...rking-in-2009/

For my business customers, where possible I always choose RAID 10 or RAID 1, especially for mission-critical servers. The reason for using mirrored RAID arrays of course is to provide fault tolerance. In other words, it's a convenience thing, rather than a 'backup', to reduce down-time in the event of a drive failure.

So, it depends on how mission-critical your system is. If reducing down-time was an important factor, I'd use a pair of drives in RAID 1 and perhaps keep the remaining bay as a hot swap, backup drive or just extra storage for less important files. If, on the other hand, down-time was less important than storage capacity, I'd probably use 3 drives in RAID 0. As long as everything is backed up, a failed drive just means the server is going to be down for a while until you've replaced it and recovered from backups.

Also, how are you calculating the power consumption comparisons? I would be surprised if the difference is that great.


How much would you be looking to sell the Poweredge for? And does it come with dual PSUs and rack rails?