RAID question

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I have a HP DL380 G5 which has 8 disk slots, I want to setup a RAID 1 mirror with the first 2x disks (146GB each) and RAID 5 with 1 hot spare on the remaining 6x disks. My question is if I setup the RAID 1 with 2x disks and installed the OS on the mirrored disks with a C: drive partition of say 70GB what would happen to the remaining 76GB of space available on the mirrored disks, will the unused space be available to be used as part of the RAID 5?

Not sure if its clear so I have detailed it below
2x 146GB disks RAID 1 mirrror - 70GB allocated for C: drive OS
6x 300GB disks RAID 5 (1 disk is a hot spare) for D: drive to be used for data storage

As above if I am not using all of the 146GB disks availablity in the RAID 1 what will happen to this space?

 

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Once you setup RAID 1 with those two disks, you can't use those disks for other RAIDs. So if you only create a partition that is 70GB and you have 76GB left over, you'll just have unallocated space that cannot be applied to any other disks other than the two mirrored disks. Is there a reason why you don't want to to allocate the whole space?

 

Thanks Theprof. If it cant be allocated to another RAID setup then I guess you may as well use all the space for the C: drive, but it seems a waste to have a 146GB C: drive in my opinion. I guess I could create say a 70GB C: drive for the OS then use the remaining 74GB for a D: drive which would then be mirrored and then finally a E: drive from the RAID 5 to be used for the user data, would that work?

 

What are you using this server for ?
Use the unallocated space as a D: drive and put the swap file on it, use it for storing crash dumps or put print queues there. In fact anything that might fill up C: and cause the system to stop working.

 

To be honest I would probably just use the entire disk for the OS, too much hassle with ARC tables should something go wrong with the mirror set trying to figure out which partition should be active etc and you won't get the benefit of putting the pagefile onto a different disk because it's actually still part of the same spindle set.