There is no optimal mass storage configuration for your Windows NT computer. The tradeoffs involved in deciding your configuration depend upon such variables as cost, performance, and how much time you can afford to take to completely rebuild a disk. This section discusses why you might want to use mirror sets, stripe sets with parity, or a combination of the two fault-tolerant software techniques on your Windows NT Server.
In general, you only need to use fault-tolerant configurations for information that you must have readily available in case of hardware failure or unrecoverable disk errors. You do not need to have your page file on a fault-tolerant volume, and you definitely should not have the page file on a stripe set with parity because of potential performance impacts.
Note
If you configure your computer running Windows NT Server to write a memory dump file each time it generates a Kernel STOP error, your page file must be located on the boot partition. If you configure your computer this way, and create a mirror set of your boot partition, the page file will be mirrored.
You might not need to configure application programs on a fault-tolerant volume. If you are considering having application programs and other common files on more than one computer running Windows NT Server, you can use replication to keep them all consistent and to provide the redundancy. If you have applications on a single computer running Windows NT Server, you only need to configure them on a fault-tolerant volume if you cannot tolerate them being unavailable for the amount of time it takes you to restore them from a backup. Be sure to back up the application program volume any time you install a new application or change default settings for an application.
You can put the application programs on a stripe set to get the fastest I/O performance for reading data.
If space is a consideration, you can format your application program volume with the NTFS file system (or convert a FAT volume to an NTFS volume), and use NTFS compression for folders and files on the volume. See Chapter 18, "Choosing a File System," in the Windows NT Workstation Resource Guide for details about NTFS compression.