I am buying a new Dell powerapp today, and I have a couple of hardware config choices to choose from.

The first choice is between RAID 1 and RAID 5. The second choice is between 18GB/15,000rpm SCSI or 36GB/10,000rpm SCSI drives.

Does the perfomance hit from RAID 1 justify a RAID 5 configuration?

Does the ease of recovery from RAID 1 justify the performance hit?

Will a 15,000 rpm drive array make up for the performance hit with RAID 1?(instead of a 10,000 rpm in RAID 1 or 5)

I am considering a RAID 1 array with 2 36GB/10,000rpm drives, will this be sufficient for hosting about 300 sites of varying sizes (50 to 250 MB each)?

Will the 15,000rpm spindle speed of the 18GB HD justify buying half of the space (of the 36GB) with little room for future upgrades(I don't want to take the server down if I do not have to)?

Thats all for now...thanx for any help.

Personally, I'd go for the 36GB 10K RPM drives in a RAID 1 configuration. That will give you more than acceptable performance, while still giving plenty of space. I don't think a hosting application will see much benefit from 15K drives, as assuming you have enough system RAM for cache, the drive won't be hit all that much anyway. The situation will be helped even further if you're getting the PERC with 128MB cache.

To give you a data point, we have a server comfortably hosting about 600 domains (mostly low-usage, though) on a RAID 1 array with 10K drives. We use Mylex RAID which tends to perform a little better than the Adaptec in the Dells, but I don't think it's that far off.

Ease of recovery from drive failure will be the same for RAID 1 or 5.