A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ MD1000 SAS SOLUTIONS  VER A00 
PAGE 32    5/06/2005 
Recommended: 
•  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 for situations which do not require high storage capacity. 
•  RAID 10 – Possible solution for situations that require greater availability and redundancy 
but not as much disk capacity. 
•  RAID 0 – While this solution is not redundant, RAID 0 may be useful for file servers that 
require better performance and maximum storage capacity, for example, where backups 
are expected to maintain data in the event of a failure. 
•  Concatenated – This solution could be used for situations that require maximum scalability 
as physical disks could be added as storage needs grow. For file servers that can afford 
some downtime and rely on backups to restore data, this could be a solution. 
Streaming Media Servers 
Streaming media servers are systems that provide web-casting, video conferencing, internet 
entertainment (e.g. Internet TV or Internet radio), and multimedia services. These systems 
generally require a balance between storage capacity, availability, redundancy, and performance. 
Like web servers, they may also be part of a group of systems that work together to provide 
content. 
Table 16: Streaming Media IO profile 
 
I/O Profile 
(Read/Write) 
I/O Profile 
(Sequential/Random) 
Bandwidth 
I/O 
Size 
Latency 
Sensitivity 
Growt
h Rate 
Criticality 
98/2  Sequential  Heavy  >64k  High  High  Varies 
 
Table 17: Streaming Media RAID Guidelines 
 
RAID Level 
Application 
Concatenated  0  1  10  5  50 
Streaming 
Media 
           
     Recommended   Not Recommended   Possible 
Recommended: 
•  RAID 5 – Recommended for streaming media servers that require maximum storage 
capacity and moderate protection and performance. This is the recommended RAID 
configuration for stand alone streaming media servers.