Server configuration--array distribution question

[LMStone]

Originally Posted by ewilen

Mark (or anyone else listening in),

How about a single RAID 10+hot spare array composed of 5 250 GB SATA drives @ 7200 RPM?

(In answer to your comment above, I anticipate about 75 ZCO users and about 15 IMAP users, though nothing will prevent people from using ZWC. Also I would guess around a couple dozen ActiveSync users on a combination of Fetch and Push.)

I'll definitely keep you updated!

SATA does really well for sustained throughput, like in media servers, but most enterprise-grade SCSI/SAS drives do much, much better than SATA on random I/O. And Zimbra does a lot of fairly random I/O.

So, we have stayed away from SATA for the most part, though SATA is fine for /opt/zimbra/backup and for HSM volumes.

RAID10 in principle is fine. Regardless of SAS or SATA, I would spring for the best hardware RAID controller you can find, with a lot of onboard cache and battery-backed as well.

With the config you describe, you might do just fine with SATA--most of the time. But when the server starts getting hammered...

Also, we look at servers having a lifetime of five years. So, when you amortize the higher cost of a SAS vs. SATA disk subsystem over five years, the extra cost per year, or even per month, is very small. SAS/SCSI over SATA just seems like cheap insurance, so that's what we do.

Hope that helps,
Mark