Disk layout on 5 drive Power Edge 2650

[jonnyRo]

I have a Dell Power Edge 2650 server that i'm currently using to host zimbra.

It's currently running centos on a Raid 5 configuration, which I know sucks.

The unit has five drives that can be set up in either raid 0, raid 1, raid 5, or even plain single volumes.

How would you recommend I set up the disk layout, and the final partition layout to achieve the best performance with zimbra. I noticed that CentOS set up the root on a giant logical volume, and the performance on this has felt pretty low.

Should I just manually set up the partition layout I want on the new server, what layout would you recommend?

[Klug]

The "best" would be (IMHO) RAID 0+1 with one spare.

But it also depends on own many users you'll have (and what kind of users) with which quota...

[jonnyRo]

I have 30 users.

The issue with the dell raid controller is that it wont let me do raid 0+1, I have the choice of creating either raid 1 volumes or raid 5 volumes. It does not support spares.

I am thinking two Raid 1 volumes would be sufficient. And leave the 5th drive for backups as a standalone volume.

I could put /opt/zimbra on one raid 1 volume and the system install on another.

Bummer this server has only 80GB disks.

[Klug]

For 30 users with "standard" mail usage (not thousands of incoming emails per day), I'd stay with RAID5...