Dear Experts, I've recently purchased an IBM x3400 server M/T: 7837-24U. The following URL is the spec sheet for my model: I went with 4 x 250GB 3.5' SATA hotswap drives. I have not installed anything, no hardware, software or OS yet. I want to configure the partitions and array level before I do so. This is my first time building one from scratch and I have three general questions: 1. The following table explains warranty service definitions in more detail. Seeing how there are only four 250GB drives, what RAID level would you suggest to obtain the greatest possible capacity and hardware redundancy? I know RAID 5 is the standard now, but I don't know if I can do that with only 4 drives. Plus I think I'd only get 66% of my 1TB total capacity and I'd like for one of the three be a hotspare as the server is destined for a remote/mobile site where obtaining replacement HS drives may take a while. I need to configure partitions and array the drives before I install OS. Would you suggest using the uEFI/BIOS setup for RAID configuration or should I boot from ServRAID Mgr disk that came with my RAID controller? I ask becasue I have no experience w/ uEFI and I think this machine uses it. Do I need to remove the SAS HBA controller that came in the server before installing the M5014 RAID controller? That is, will they screw each other up if they're both in there? I'll eventually be putting MS Server 2003 x64 on it. The machine will be a secondary DC, DNS, file, print, and application server and will serve about 25 users/clients at a time. Other than that, I think that's all the critical info I have. I'd be very greatful for any advice or general guidelines regarding RAID configuration on IBM machines Experts might have. Sincerly, ORBISUSER. Raid 5 is going to give you the redundancy needed to insure there are no data losses. This requires 3 drives and the 4th would be a hot spare. Raid 10 on the other hand would give you redundancy plus the performance of striping it's like Raid 1 and Raid 5 together, but that would not leave you with a hot spare. This is a better performing raid. So the decision for which raid comes down to the hot spare desire and which is more needed, redundancy to protect against data loss, or performance with redundancy and no hot spare. Your load for dns, file and print sharing with 25 users will allow you to go either way. But if any of the applications are server intense, you might want to go raid 10. Use the disk that came with the Raid controller, this is always more reliable than bios raid. Unless you are planning to add more drives, I don't see any reason to leave the SAS HBA in there.
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