why do already built server systems not have a drive for the OS?

[jozeftierney]

I've been looking at premade rack mounted servers on newegg/Dell/Asus as well as other sites and it seems like none of them have internal drives for an operating system, just the (usually hot swapable) RAID array drive bays on the front.

I've been doing research and people usually recommend having the operating system on it's own drive so why does that so rarely show up as an option?

Did I not do enough research, is the operating system better off in the RAID array with all the data?

Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Snipergod87]

What is your intended use?

 

[jozeftierney]

What is your intended use?

Application server for Solidworks PDM. Mainly for licensing with the storage server being a separate NAS most likely.

 

[Snipergod87]

In general my recommendation for the OS being on its own RAID 1 array.
If you need to restore from the backup the full OS drive you don't lose and production data, and some data sets like SQL server can be very IO intensive, so it is best for those to be on a separate storage array, and heavy IO loads don't negatively impact system performance and slow everything down. It heavily depends on the use case. And if you have a RAID controller with a cache you can choose to only use the cache on the OS or the data array to increase performance more on one or both arrays.

For us our SQL server have 2x disks in RAID 1 for the OS, than a few other disks in RAID 5/6/10 depending on the size for the SQL data, but virtualization servers only have two disks in RAID 1.

Since you wont be putting a SQL database on here and I imagine the projects will be stored on a NAS or something with its own backup, you could easily just have 1 disks in RAID 1.

 

[ss202sl]

Disks are not included because depending on use, you may want specific type(for speed) or size of disks.
Also some people connect servers to external(SAN) storage and may not need local disks at all