Dual Raid 1 or RAID 10 - Whitebox ESXi + Perc 5i

[kiwidj]

Hi,

I'm building an ESXi box for home on a Lenovo D10 workstation, I'm getting a Dell Perc 5i controller for it which is dual channel and I'll be buying 4 1TB SATA disks for storage.

My question is since I will have multiple VM's across the storage:

Am I better to use two disks per channel - then mirror each two disk set into a mirrored RAID 1 set? (so will have similar to single drive performance but will lower the amount of I/O to each disk since VM's will be placed on one VMFS or the other..)

OR

Create a single RAID10 set using all 4 disks on one channel? (so will have close to striped performance but multiple VM's on the same VMFS..)

OR

am I able to split the disks across both channels and still create a RAID10 set? - any pro's or con's to doing this (-if it can be done)?


in terms of capacity - 2TB will be more than enough capacity for my purposes for the VM's I need, they will be running things like SQL / Exchange / Altiris / ConfigMgr etc for testing and lab purposes only.

also any recommendations on what 1TB SATA hard drives perform best for RAID? I've read some aren't designed to be used in RAID?

 

[leadtrombone]

Ok so for you situation raid 5 access will be faster the both raid 0 , 1 and 10

You could save yourself some money by buying aless expensive card there are some really nice cards sub 600 that support raid 5 .
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816131003

This is one of the cards that I have been looking at for my file server. For hard drives the 32 meg cache 1 tb drives are fine for raid.

If you have any question pm me

 

[kiwidj]

Sounds good - 3TB usable sounds better with RAID 5 then also!

In terms of controller the Perc 5i already does RAID 5 (also RAID Level 0, 1, 10, 50) and is supported by ESXi so will stick with that..

Thanks!

 

[kiwidj]

sorry I just realised what you meant - the Perc 5i was bought on ebay brand new for $180 so cheaper than the Areca anyway.

 

[kiwidj]

Best answer selected by kiwidj.