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Mirrored Drives Without a Controller?

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by mmbarreca

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We have a server that has SCSI drives at 18 GB. No RAID controller was purchased for the server and I've been researching whether you can mirror drives without the controller. Part of the one drive is FAT (utilities) and we would prefer to not have to reconfigure to make it NTFS but if that is the only way, then we will do it.

Is there any other way (since there is a SCSI controller) to mirror these drives? Thanks!

5 replies

by timwalsh

You don't mention whether you are using NT or Win2K.

Basic info: The disk managment tool in both of these server OSes will allow you to mirror partitions (or the entire drive if drives are a single partition. The partitions must be formatted asNTFS. In Win2K, you have the extra requirement that the disks involved must be converted from basic to dynamic disks.

Hope this what you are looking for.

by lordinfidel

While if you are using NT/2K you can use sotware raid, It is not the reccommended practice.

I _*strongly_* reccomend using a hardware based raid solution. Raid Controllers are not expensive for doing basic raid of 2 disks.

Even a basic PERC-II card (dell) is about 400.
But that is a higher end raid card then what you probably need.

The utilities drive does not matter. I am assuming then that this is probably a compaq server if it has a utilities drive that is FAT. They usually do.
The compaq cards are cheap also.

It all depends on whether or not you want memory on the controller and battery backup on it. That is the main difference between the higher end and lower ends cards. Besides of course the number of channels. You can probably get away with a single channel scsi raid controller.'

Stay away from software raid. There is a reason why it is not used.

by mmbarreca

We were told that a RAID controller should have been purchased with the server. We contacted the person who purchased it and they stated that Dell already mirrors the drives so we don't need the controller (yes - our eyes rolled when we heard this).

The Dell server (PowerEdge) has the utilities in FAT format. We basically want to have SQL mirrored since there will be three databases being maintained on this server.

Thanks for the help!

by lordinfidel

I am assuming that you are not running a drive array.

How many drives do you guy's have now?

FYI- Dell Servers does "normally" come with a Perc2 S/C card. This is for the OS which is normally 2 9 gig drives in a raid 1 (mirrored) config.

When it boots up look for something called adaptec controller, press ctrl+a, you will see that the drives are mirrored. This is normal for dells, especially if you bought it preconfigured.

If you have multiple drives, that is more than 2, and you have your sql database across those other drives, then you need a different controller.

The optimal solution, assuming that this is a business application for real time database warehousing. Would to have sql on it's own set of drives in a raid 5config, with a controller like a Perc 3 sc/dc.

Your OS should be on it's own set of drives mirrored at the hardware level. Partitioned into a 4 gig and the remaining space should be used for logs for sql.

SQL should really be on it's own array.

Side note.... Any time you create anything on a server, it should be on a seperate volume or array from that of the OS. If your OS is c:\winnt, then you should not have C:\Inetpub\Websites (IIS) or C:\SQL7\Databases

It is just bad Mojo doing it that way. Even for a file server, put the files on a differernt partition.

by tbragsda

Splurge, buy the controler.

I have little fath in software RAID, and VERY little fath in MSs software RAID. Hardware always works better/faster.

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