Hi, Planning to get a new hardware for my Exchange Server 2007. I have like around 300 users and planning to give them 200MB mailbox space per user. Which is suitable RAID 5 or 10? And what capacity of HDD should be ideal? I read somewhere saying that if you are getting a larger HDD capacity that you needed it will result in poor perfomance due to capacity utilization. Thanks

300 users is not very many so the decision is a little more difficult because the performance that the disk can probably provide exceeds the IOPS you're going to demand. Ordinarily you'll see people tell you to steer clear of RAID5 because Exchange 2007 smooths out the read/write ratio. However, the amount of money you have to spend might just lead you to accept the slightly lower performance RAID5 arrays give you over RAID1 / 10........ Now. Performance. It's true, in the loosest possible sense, that the larger disks are going to give you lower performance. This is because SAS disks are 450/600GB in size (marketing size) and the SATA ones are 1 or 2TB in size. SAS/FC will drive ~150 IOPS and SATA ~65. Those are broad numbers and to be taken in ratio terms rather than specific. So you can see that the SAS disks will handle a lot more IOPS than SATA so you need to decide whether you want capacity or horsepower. Since you've only got 300 users at 200MB each it probably makes sense for you to buy SAS. If you move to 2010 that's reversed and SATA will likely fit your IOPS needs (because 2010 is far better than 2007 which was itself far better than 2003). No one answer is simple, no one answer is correct and undebatable. It's all about choice and balance."mykech" wrote in message news:10caa82a-a965-4027-9294-99d7556281dd...Hi,Planning to get a new hardware for my Exchange Server 2007. I have like around 300 users and planning to give them 200MB mailbox space per user.Which is suitable RAID 5 or 10? And what capacity of HDD should be ideal? I read somewhere saying that if you are getting a larger HDD capacity that you needed it will result in poor perfomance due to capacity utilization. Thanks Mark Arnold, Exchange MVP.

Please refer to the following thread: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/exchangesvradmin/thread/fb0901b1-fa3c-4a59-bc47-479ad7cfa72c Thanks, Elvis