Exchange 2010 - Still need fast HD's?

[stoofa]

We're currently sorting out an Exchange Server for our offices in China.
Currently 11 people out there, might grow to 15.

With Exchange it has always beenr ecommended that you use fast HD's.
Our early Exchange 2000 servers all ran on 15k SCSI disks.

Could we get away with a RAID 5 array of 7.2k SATA HD's for Exchange 2010?
Or would we be better off going the SAS route?

Ta

 

[Yamahahahahaha]

For 15 users you could get away with a single 7.2k drive. Exchange 2010 lives in RAM practically. Not that you should obviously, but RAID5 with 7.2k drives will be ample from an IO perspective.

We do have a customer running a 500 mailbox Exch2010 server off a 3 drive 15k RAID5. It works amazingly well, testament to MS really.
250MB per mailbox.

Have a read of these;
http://www.thecabal.org/2010/01/from-whence-redundancy-exchange-2010-storage-essays-part-1/
http://www.thecabal.org/2010/05/the-disks-the-thing-exchange-2010-storage-essays-part-2/

His entire blog is full of useful bits on Exchange 2010, obviously this should supplement your own reading.

 

[brainchylde]

We run 2007 on a SAN with 7.2k discs.. we have many many accounts (6000~) - most of these are light users. The box has 12gig of RAM though - Exchange will use nearly all of this.

So in answer to your question - yes, you should be fine, but as someone says, the newer generations of Exchange tend to live in RAM, so that's probably a more important consideeration than HD's.

 

[stoofa]

Thanks for that.
We're going to kit it out with a 4C Xeon 2.4GHz CPU.
Then 12GB of RAM.
So it looks like we can go for SATA over SAS for the drive array.

Cheers.