postgres installation - best configuration?

Hello all,

I realise this is a little off-topic, however I have been unable to find a
more
suitable newsgroup aside from linux.postgres which is basically dead.

This weekend I will be building a couple of new postgres database servers
under RH7.3, and I am currently deciding between 2 different configuration
options. The new servers feature hot-swappable RAID w/ 3 hard drives in
each.

Option #1
Use one drive for the linux boot partition, a second for the database data,
and the third to store the indexes. I have heard this can offer a reasonable
performance advantage by reducing the read/writes on any particular SCSI
channel/drive and speeding up lookups due to the dedicated index drive.

Option #2
Simply set the server up with RAID level 5 and run everything from the one
RAID partition. This would allow us to take advantage of the hot-swappable
features and would probably be more reliable.

From my understanding of hardware RAID, the striped disk array should offer
optimum performance anyway, as the read/writes would be striped in clusters
across the disks, however I can see how the use of the dedicated index drive
would speed up the use of indexes (but with reduced performance on the data
reads in comparison to RAID).

If anyone has experience with either of these configurations, or can offer
any other suggestions for best performance/reliability I would really
appreciate the input.

Thank you in advance.

--
David Kennedy
ALFCO Communications