Question : What is the optimal six disk configuration for Exchange 2007?

We are in the planning phase of a Exchange 2007 Deployment. We are a smaller sized organization with around 75 users currently. Over the life of the server we will not take on more than 150 users total. Our server has 6 x 146GB 15K Drives. What would be the best way to partition these to get the best I/O performance and some fault tolerance? Most of our email users are not heavy users, but about a dozen of us are. We do perform nightly differential backups and a weekly full backup. I've heard that RAID 10 is the most efficient, but I'm not sure if that's a viable option with only six disks. I also wasn't sure how much space to allocate for logs. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Trey Anderson
Systems Engineer

Answer : What is the optimal six disk configuration for Exchange 2007?

If it were me personally and the RAID controller supports it, I would put 2 discs into a RAID 1 array for the OS, then 3 into a RAID 5 array, with a hot spare. That way you could have an OS drive fail and still be ok, or you could have a data drive fail and it would rebuild itself, and you'd still have the OS separated from your data.