Recommended server RAID level

[bluecherry]

We picked up a Dual core dual Xeon 3.0ghz with 2GB of ram and 4 x 73gb 15k SCSI U320 drives. The server is a Dell Poweredge and has the Perc3i controller.

I went with RAID10 because I saw posts on various sites that this would be better for SQL read / writes. I typically use RAID5 and this is my first experience with RAID10.

Does anyone have similar hardware and can tell me which is faster / better optimized? Our site is small now ~300 products and only 8GB / month but I want it to be fast!

[AbleMods]

All depends on your wallet and your goals.

found this that explains it pretty concisely...

Raid 5 has a severe penalty when what you're writing to the drives is smaller then the blocksize. There are a lot of small writes, and not many reads. But if you shrink the blocksize to deal with smaller writes, then RAID5 will penalize you with a speed loss yet again, because now it has to contend with many more blocks.

Plus, RAID10 doesn't have parity, so it will always be faster then the same hardware configured as a RAID5.

Personally, RAID10 is always preferred to RAID5, the problem is it can become very cost prohibitve very quickly.

Fast will always be a matter of more than your drive configuration. Bandwidth, site design and traffic load also play a large part. Just putting your SQL db on a separate server from the IIS box will help significantly.

Currently I'm running RAID1 mirrored 15k drives in a dual processor Xeon 3.06Ghz with 4Gb RAM. Feel free to browse around Solunar.com and see what you perceive for performance. IIS and SQL Express are on the same box.