Hello-
I am planning a migration from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010. A single Exchange 2003 server currently hosts around 75 user mailboxes and approximately 60 resource-type mailboxes (i.e. conference rooms). The server has one (private) Mailbox Store of approximately 205GB (edb+stm) and one Public Store of approximately 2.2GB (edb+stm).
For the new Exchange 2010 box, all server roles with the exception of Edge will be hosted on a single Proliant DL360G7. (Edge role will not be used - have an appliance for this function). Server has 6 available drive bays to be occupied with 300GB 10K RPM SAS drives. Maximum performance is of greater importance than cost. I have decided to go strictly with a RAID1/10 solution (over RAID5) for max performance. HA/DAGs will not be used.
Question: Is one of these options better in terms of performance, or fail-over, than the other?
Option 1: 4 x 300GB in RAID 10 set. OS partition (basic disk) of around 150-200GB, data partition (basic disk) for log files and databases of remaining space. Could expand RAID10 by 2 disks down the road as needed. Growth is relatively slow in this environment.
Option 2: 2 x 300GB in RAID 1 set for OS and log files. 4 x 300GB in RAID10 for databases.
For this type of environment, I'm wondering if I would see any benefit / performance gain from Option 2 or whether 1 is good enough.
Comments? Thanks.
p.s. I downloaded the Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server Role requirements calculator. Wondering, considering my design parameters (definitely using RAID1/10 with 10K SAS) is even necessary. Thoughts?