Server MySQL question
 

I am getting ready to build my second sever and I have some questions. I want to make this server better then the first one I built. Here are the stats on my first one and the one I am currently using:

2x INTEL XEON 5345 2.33GHZ 8MB QUAD CORE, This is 8 cores
4x 2048MB Memory giving me a total of 8GB of memory
4x 250GB hard drive setup as raid 10 = 500GB total usage
1x 250GB as a backup drive
1x 250GB a spare drive

This works fine for what I am using this for. For my second server I am going to have 8 hard drives. Four of the hard drives will be set on a raid 10 I think. I want to use the other four hard drives for MySQL databases. What would be the best way to set these drives up for MySQL?

You should be setting up the mysql drives in raid 10 (4 drives needed).

I would prolly do a raid 0/1 for your served page drives (2 mirrored), having 1 backup and 1 spare drive.

My thoughts were for setting the MySQL drives as a raid 10 and the other four I was thinking of putting on a raid 10 also. That would give me two raid 10 setups. In having raid 10 setups I would not really need a spare drive because if one of the raid 10 drives failed it would give me time to send them a new drive to replace it. The backup drive would be nice also. It is a tossup though.
If I go raid 0 and one of the drives fails I am screwed because all the data will be lost.
If I go raid 1 then won't the read and write speed be slower then a raid 10?

If your looking for redundancy and speed, then raid 10 is favorable over raid 5.

As to raid 0 - Yes you would lose the data, but that is what backups are for and typically using a NAS backup at the host is favorable as well.

As to Raid 1 - The speeds should basically be the same as Raid 10, as Raid 10 is basically Raid 1 & 0 combined.