What's best - Xserve, have  4 drives, mirror... stripe?

Hi all
A friend has ordered a new Xserve, which comes with an 80Gb drive.
He's also ordered 3 x 500Gb drive modules.
What is the best way to set-up the Xserve?
My friend does design and makes up pages in Quark 6 with Photoshop .eps files linked. All his images are hires.
He makes pdf's hi and lores versions.
He currently has retrospect backing up his current server (OS Server and firewire drives), which could be used to back up his new server, the machines are in different rooms.
Is striping 2/3 of the drives better than mirroring ??
Any help appreciated.
wilse

There is no 'best' answer to this question. The answer depends on many factors that no one other than the ultimate user can know.
For example, striping and mirroring provide two very different benefits.
Mirroring maintains all data on two or more drives so that if one drive fails, you can still keep running.
Striping spreads data across multiple drives for increased speed, but offers no redundancy (lose one drive, lose them all).
Mirroring will result in a final volume size equal to the smallest drive in the mirror (e.g., mirroring two 500GB drive results in a 500GB volume).
Striping results in a final volume equal to the sum of its parts (striping two 500GB drives will result in a 1TB volume).
You need to determine whether the increased space and speed of a striped volume is more or less valuable to you than the data protection offered by mirroring.
You'll also need to take into account how much data you're trying to store - if you have 800GB of data then a mirrored volume isn't going to cut it anyway.
For his workflow you might find the performance of a stripe to be beneficial, even if you don't need all the space, but you will need to be aware than a failure of any drive in the stripe will render the entire volume useless.
Finally, consider how much time (and money) it will cost to restore a failed system. If a disk failure brings you down for 8 hours and you're charging clients $200/hr, then you might opt for the mirrored option on a cost-benefit analysis (a failed drive in a mirror should result in zero downtime, letting you replace the drive when its convenient for you).
You (or your friend) need to weigh the factors to decide what's best.

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