title: Optimal RAID setup for SQL server
body: <p>We have an SQL 2005 database backend for our website, currently about 10GB in size. There are a lot more reads than writes, though I don't have the exact statistics.</p>
  
  <p>We're upgrading our database server and I was thinking of getting 4 disks and setting them up in two RAID 1 arrays - one for the data files and the other for the OS and log files. Would this be the optimal set-up or would RAID 5 be better for the data files? RAID 10 gets a bit pricey and is probably overkill for us.</p>
  
  <p>At this stage SQL Server should keep much of the database in RAM (8GB), but it will grow, so I don't want to entirely rely on that.</p>
  
  <p>Edit: we definitely want redundancy on a production server, so RAID 0 by itself is out. RAID 10 is nice, but might be a bit expensive for us.</p>