With the relative inexpensive drives you’re talking, you’d be best to go with the raid 5 setup and turn that into your home directory just for safety and redundancy, then you can keep your raid one to preserve VM and your OS. VM can setup the raid for you.
yes indeed. However I notice I didn’t explain myself very well, sorry for this.
The server has room for only 3 disks.
I can either have 2x36gb in raid 1 + 1x 73gb or
3x 73 gb in raid 5 (which means extra costs for buying 2 more disks)
or should I partition the 73GB disk into 3 volumes and make those volumes raid 5?
The machine has a perc 3/di hardware raid controller.
As you see I am really quite new to this.
the purpose of raid 5 is to be able to replace a disk in the raid without losing your data. If you want security get the new drives. If you want the room, make the 73 your home partition, the first 36 your working partition and the other 36 an auxiliary (throw your system and VM backups onto it. THe domain owner can always be required to backup to his hard drive ( a recommended policy anyway).