A client ordered themselves a Dell server and dropped it off today to have me set it up as their new domain controller and as their development box for our application(s) at their site. Nice little PowerEdge unit that seems beefy ’nuff to do the job.
One major bummer though. It was ordered with a pair of 500 GB drives and the drive controller isn’t RAID capable. *sigh*
Not to be overly cautious, but I just don’t do single-spindle servers anymore. Give me, at a minimum, a RAID 1 mirror. Sure, I’ll have backups for it too, but a mirrored drive sure is a lot faster to recover! (seriously, I set up a 6 drive RAID 1+0 earlier this week. I don’t care if it costs some space)
Yes, I’m speaking from experience (the final straw was just last summer in fact!). So, next week I’ll be dumping that time-saving factory OS install and reloading this thing so that I can get the drives “right”. I’ll take a software RAID mirror over nothing, I reckon.
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February 21st, 2008 
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Are they SATA Drives? You can get a PCI SATA RAID 1 controller for cheap these days. Hardware RAID 1 is better for 2 reasons in my mind. MUCH better performance, and better reliability. When the Windows based software RAID breaks, Recovery is not guaranteed and you better plan on your server being a dog for a few days while the RAID rebuilds.
@Nathan – yep, SATA. Priced out a controller from the Dell folks. $400 ($200 refurb) omfg, they’re nuts!
I did propose that the client should consider getting a proper controller added. Just waiting to hear the response before I start.