Hi!

I am just starting with the setup for my first centrals NAS / SAN combination. Open-E is running and the first basic config has been done. My controller is a 3ware 9650 with 8 pieces of 500 GB SATA 24/7 Barracuda hard disks from Seagate. I do not need so much space so I decided to configure RAID-10 for speed and security resulting in 2 TB usable storage space.

I will use the first TB for NAS storage which will be used from up to 10 clients. In the second TB I will create an iSCSI volume, which will be used from 3 ESXi hosts for VMFS storage of about 5 VMs (mixed VMs of database, mail server and so on).

Now here is my question:
How do I setup the RAID? Do I create 2 arrays of 4 disks each, one for iSCSI and the other one for NAS?
Or do I get even better speed, when I create one big arrax with 8 disks, where I will create a share on and an iSCSI volume?

I searched a lot on google for recommendations about RAID, but I found nothing that fits my question..