Integrated Hardware RAID-0, -1, -1E, optional RAID-5, -6, -10, -50, -60
This sounds a little worrisome to me, it sounds like a low-end RAID controller. You want a good RAID controller that can keep up with 8 fast HDDs (that's actually not a given). If you have a fair amount of writes to your DB, then you really want a Battery Backup Unit, and to enable battery-protected write caching on the RAID controller.
As for RAID disk layout, there are 2 common schools of thought:
- 2 disks in mirror for OS, 2 disks in mirror for DB transaction log, 4 disks in RAID 10 for main DB files.
- One big RAID 10 array using all disks, and all OS + log + datastore files on this array (see reasoning here, mirrored by BAARF).
I would rather not take sides on the RAID volume design, it tends to become a bit of a fact-light discussion. Ideally you should experiment with different storage layouts and benchmark them for your specific workload. My gut feel is that all disks in RAID10 is faster and more robust over multiple workloads.
One last thing, to make sure that OS partitions and RAID stripe boundaries are aligned (see here, Windows centric, but the principle is general). You can do this when you create the partitions.
The "system" partition on Windows 7/2008 is the 100 MByte partition that contains the hardware-related files and the Boot folder that tell a computer where to look to start Windows.
A "boot" partition is where the Windows system32 folder is located.
A disk can be basic or dynamic. The partition style/scheme can be either MBR or Guid.
A dynamic partition offers additional capabilities, such as the ability to create volumes that span multiple disks (spanned and striped volumes) and the ability to create fault-tolerant volumes (mirrored and RAID-5 volumes). Regardless of whether the dynamic disks on a system use the MBR or GPT partition style, you can create up to 2,000 dynamic volumes on a system, although the recommended number of dynamic volumes is 32 or less.
You can create up to four partitions on a basic disk using the MBR partition scheme: either four primary partitions, or three primary and one extended. The extended partition can contain one or more logical drives.
A dynamic disk MBR layout is similar to the basic disk MBR layout, except that only one primary partition is allowed (referred to as the LDM partition), no extended partitioning is allowed, and there is a hidden partition at the end of the disk for the LDM database.
Windows Server 2003 SP1 and later can use a partition style known as the globally unique identifier (GUID) partition table (GPT) in addition to the MBR partition style. A Guid partition allows partitions larger than 2 TB, but you cannot install windows on a partition larger than that. GPT boot volumes are also not supported on many older versions of Windows. A basic disk using the GPT partition style can have up to 128 primary partitions, while dynamic disks will have a single LDM partition as with MBR partitioning. Because basic disks using GPT partitioning do not limit you to four partitions, you do not need to create extended partitions or logical drives.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/What-are-system-partitions-and-boot-partitions
Basic and Dynamic Disks
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa363785%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
Disk Concepts and Troubleshooting
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc977219.aspx
Partition styles
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc738081.aspx
Best Answer
Best option is to buy a 4th disk and R10 them.