raid and lvm with 8 disks....suggestions?

[Luca Ferrari]

Hi all,
I'm approaching a new server with 8x146GB SAS disks and an hardware 
controller. The server will store a lot of database data and will work also 
as a file server and I'm wondering what could be the better configuration for 
running it. My first thought was about 2x147 raid 1 for the system, and 5 
raid 5 with 1 spare disk. The two disks in mirroring for the system itself 
and the raid5 for the data. Is this a good solution? Could it be better to 
make all the disks raid5? Moreover, I was thinking of activating lvm so that 
part of the raid1 array could be used as space for the data too, does it make 
sense? Any suggestion or link to a good documentation that can drive me to 
the choice?

Thanks,
Luca