Best RAID configuration

We recently purchased an HP LC3 NetServer which has three 9 Gb SCSI drives and a one channel RAID controller. We're using Oracle 8 and NT4.0. The server has 256Mb of RAM. The server has to serve two databases and the data needs to remain separate.

I'm trying to come up with the best configuration for this server. I'm thinking about doing the following:

2Gb partition off each disk, leaving 7Gb on each One stripe set with two logical drives (the RAID controller supports this) of 7Gb ea.
One paging file (256Mb - 268Mb) one each disk (3 total) in the 2Gb partitions of each disk

I read somewhere that not everything should be installed onto a stripe set ie sequential data such as log files. Would transaction logs (ARC files) fall under this category? Are there any other items that should be excluded from the stripe set?

I would also like to confirm the following calculations for RAID 5

total stripe set size= s * (n-1) where s is the smallest unusable area of all disks and n is the number of disks

total size lost to parity= 1/n where n is the number of disks.

This means that although my stripe set will be 14Gb, only 9.4Gb of it can be useable?

Thanks for any help.

Regards,

R. Baker
rbaker_at_quiktrak.com.au Received on Sun Nov 14 1999 - 08:35:28 CST