If you only had 6 drives how would you configure NPM/SQL?

I am by no means a RAID guru but I would configure the 2 146GB drives as a mirror for the OS and swap (maybe on a seperate partition from the OS maybe not.

The only reason to go RAID 10 with 4 drives, as I see it, is to be able to lose 2 drives and still continue to run. Personally I want the capacity so I would go RAID 5 and if needed I would add a hot spare into the mix when possible.

You could also go RAID 6, it would end up being the same capacity as a RAID 10 though. If running RAID 5, 6 or 10 I would expect you to get approxiamtely the same performance with 4 spindles, RAID 6 and 10 aren't normally run on fewer than 8 drives.

Of course I could be full of it too. Good luck!

It looks like you're on the right track. RAID 10 (Data) on the 300's and RAID 1 (OS APP) on the 146's. You will only have 2 effective spindles for the data so if there is anything you can do to oround up a couple more 300's it would help a lot.  Putting NPM and SQL on the same box may cause slowness. The number of elements will make a big impact. Here is a paper we just put up this week on Orion Performance.

Avoid Raid 5 and 6. The performance will be dismal.

My understanding is that RAID10 has better performance than RAID5 and only needs minimum 4 drives. The part I don't know about is if 575 to 600 GB of space is enough with 4x300GB drives. We've been running since November with the trial and now live on a test server and our database is around 4GB in size. The concern I had was putting the tempdb and transaction logs on another raid set. The only other option I could see was have two raid1 sets. One for the main database and one for the tempdb and transaction logs.

unfortunately the R710 can only hold 6 drives. however it's nice they let me keep 32GB ram. perhaps if I give SQL 26GB or so the whole DB could be in cache and not need to use the disk for reads very much. I don't know how to force that of course.

thanks Andy. I'll give it a look-see.

limiting RAM used should be (using SQL mgmt studio) right click on server -> properties -> memory -> use "max server memory"

of course, depending on what version - but should be somewhere around there.

Set the minimum memory in SQL so it will have the amount you want always available.  And for $10 you could put the data files on ramdisk and get a huge boost.

njoylif and mcgridea, are you suggesting that's the only thing to concern myself with? Do you have any reasons to suggest 2 RAID1 sets vs 1 RAID10 set for the 300GB drives?

Use the RAID 10 option for SQL. You will get 2X the throughput of RAID 1.