I have been allocated some budget in our company to spend on new hardware and I instantly thought about upgrading our database server.

I know that the biggest performance boost would be not in the memory, or processor but in the disks.

I thought of getting two 10,000 rpm drives and setting them up using serial ATA meaning the data is on both of them - striped or something I think it's called.

I know this can be a bad idea due to the reliability factor but if it goes wrong the most we would lose is half a day's work.

Do you think that drive configuration would be the best way to improve performance?

Rather than shoving 1GB of memory in I think it might be the way to go.

Thanks

I like Ultra160 or Ultra320 SCSI drives for both performance and reliability. The raid configuration you want is mirroring. I do believe that mirroring is overrated as a protection from data loss, as most data loss is caused by the actions of software, not hardware failures.

-bd

Stiping will give you faster access because you get 2 drive heads doing the work of 1, in essence. Mirroring will give you better protection since the same thing is written twice. Drive speed trumps memory size or processor power.

I was thinking of striping rather than mirroring.

I thought that it might improve things rather than stuffing extra memory in there, 2 drive heads reading and writing.

I have a mirror running on our exchange server so I am aware of its benefits - and for our filemaker data I have backups going on left, right and centre to the point that we can only lose a maximum of 1/2 a day's work if the striped drives blow up.

I too am very wary about mirroring as the main risk to our data tends to be corruption rather than disk hardware failure. And in the past with a mirror we have just ended up mirroring the corruption. Nothing can beat the off-site copy backups that I have running to my computer at home over night.

Thanks for your help guys

The thing I don't like about mirroring is that if you lose one of the disks, you might as well be totally down. Once you put a new disk in, it starts to rebuild the mirror which will take up most of the servers resources. You get horrible performance during this time so it really didn't save you much over striping it and having a backup.

Just my two cents.

John

Yeah, mirroring is worthless against fire, flood, software corruption, and basic user stupidity. Offsite backups are the way to go, especially if the backup can be scheduled and uploaded to an offsite server automatically via FTP.

My new machine just arrived via FedEx moments ago! Unfortunately the drives were on back order and won't be in until tomorrow. I had been thinking about a mirror raid configuration, but I think I've been persuaded to striping.

Thanks,

Dan

For us, as I do have an off-site backup routine to a few different remote locations using FTP, I think striping some 10,000rpm drives will be the way forward.

If it breaks, it breaks. We've lost 5 hours of database work at the most. I'll take the risk for super database performance I think.

Thanks guys