can i use raid 1 & 5 together in my windows 2003(active directory domain controller/file server) server? this server will act as an active directory domain controller and a file server as well. i want to use RAID1 for the OS(operating system) and RAID5 for the files that is being shared in the network. please help. thanks in advance.
RAID levels are usually controlled by the disk controllers and configured at the BIOS level. These have utilities that can be run on the OS, but they usually do more alarming and information tasks than actual RAID configuration.
Check the documentation on the drive controllers you have on your server.
There are RAID systems that are software rather than hardware based, but there is a real performance hit associated with them. Go Hardware RAID if you can
sure. just as long as you have the disk controllers that can support that configuration. but, in my opinion, i would only do that if there were two physically different controllers (assuming they’re pci-based); one for raid-1 & one for raid-5. if it’s a physical standalone disk array w/ it’s own hardware raid controllers, sure. no problem. otherwise, that’s a big computational load that you’ll be putting on a single pci raid controller. even worse if you’re using a software volume manager because the load would then be put directly on the system’s cpu’s & memory. and, since it’s going to be your active directory domain controller and a file server, you’re risking the chance of poor performance. especially, if it’s going to be a busy file server. what i recommend doing, after you’ve got it built but, before deploying it to production, benchmark the server’s read/write performance of the file server portion.