A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ MD1000 SAS SOLUTIONS  VER A00 
PAGE 31    5/06/2005 
Table13: Archival File Server RAID Guidelines 
 
RAID Level 
Application 
Concatenated  0  1  10  5  50 
File -
Archival 
     
   
     Recommended   Not Recommended   Possible 
 
Recommended: 
•  RAID 10 – Recommended due to high availability, redundancy, and good performance. 
•  RAID 5 – Recommended for file servers that require maximum storage capacity and 
moderate data protection and performance. 
•  RAID 50 – Recommended for those solutions that require a balance between storage 
capacity and performance.  
Possible: 
•  RAID 1 – Possible solution in situations which do not require high storage capacity. 
Not recommended: 
•  RAID 0, Concatenated - These are not recommended due to lack of redundancy and data 
protection. Even for long term archival storage which is intended to be a backup of 
important files, it is not a recommended solution. 
Note: While these configurations are not recommended, they can be configured and utilized.  
User file store characteristics and recommendations 
 
Table 14: User Store File Server General IO profile 
 
I/O Profile 
(Read/Write) 
I/O Profile 
(Sequential/Random) 
Bandwidth 
I/O 
Size 
Latency 
Sensitivity 
Growt
h Rate 
Criticality 
80/20  Sequential  Heavy  >64k  High  Varies  Moderate 
 
Table 15: User Store File Server RAID Guidelines 
 
RAID Level 
Application 
Concatenated  0  1  10  5  50 
File – User 
file stores 
           
     Recommended   Not Recommended   Possible