SBS - Hard Drive Partitioning Schemes

There doesn't seem to be one guideline out there as far as how to partition a hard drive, or hard drives for Small Business Server.

Do we RAID our drives? Most certainly! We need that extra level of redundancy.

Surely no one puts together servers with only one hard disk or two hard disks without redundancy in it anymore?

Over the years, we have come up with a number of different hard drive setups depending on our client's business size and data volume needs.

A small client, say 5 to 15 seats, with a small volume of data would be setup as follows (physical disk properties & setup first with partitioning sub'd) :

• 2 x 320 GB RAID 1 array (non-hot swap)
• Primary System Partition: C: (310 GB)
• Swap and URL Cache Partition S: (10 GB)
• 2 x 320 GB RAID 1 array (non-hot swap)
• Data Partition I: (320 GB)

In the above setup, VSS snapshot data would be stored on the C: partition leaving the I: partition totally to client data.

We have clients with higher data volume demands, some growing as fast as 15 GB per month during their peak seasons.

For some of them, and our larger firms in the 25-45 seat range we would configure the following:

• 2 x 320 GB RAID 1 array (hot swap)
• Primary System Partition: C: (310 GB)
• Swap and URL Cache Partition S: (10 GB)
• 3 x 320 GB RAID 5 array - 620 GB usable (hot swap)
• Data Partition I: (620 GB)
• 1 x 320 GB Global Hot Spare (hot swap)

We keep all of the drives the same size for the principle reason of having the hot spare available for either of the arrays. That is why it is considered Global, because it can be inserted into any array on the RAID controller. A hot spare can also be dedicated to any one of the specific arrays.

For the larger data volume clients:

• 2 x 500 GB RAID 1 array (hot swap)
• Primary System Partition: C: (480 GB)
• Swap and URL Cache Partition S: (10 GB)
• 5 x 500 GB RAID 5 array - 2.0 TB usable (hot swap)
• Client Data Partition I: (500 GB)
• 2 x 500 GB RAID 1 array (hot swap)
• VSS & Server Data Partition J: (500 GB)
• 1 x 500 GB Global Hot Spare (hot Swap)

We put the swap file and ISA's URL cache (99.9% Premium installs) on a separate partition to prevent them from being fragmented on the system C: partition. It facilitates increased system speed.

The same reason is used for setting up the VSS (Volume Shadow copy Service) snapshot files on a different drive/partition than the volume that is being shadow copied.

Relative to the other components that are being configured in a server, hard drive storage is cheap. Seagate's ES Series Enterprise SATA drives command a 10% premium over their desktop drives for extra reliability built in. That figure is a small price to pay for drives designed to be always on and serving huge chunks of data on a daily basis.

At this point, SCSI/SAS does not provide the cost/size ROI benefit for pretty much all of our clients that SATA does. There are a few exceptions to that rule though not many in our SMB environment.

Of course, your mileage will vary! ;)

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists