need data security - use SSD, raid, or both?

[ThePiston]

I've got a very important medical database I upkeep in my office. I keep it on a separate drive which is backed up nightly on external HDD as well as online. The Windows drive is also on its own drive.

I'm building a new server. I'm putting the data on a mirror raid, but I wanted to make sure that the application doesn't crap out with a disk failure as well. I really need to keep database safe but the Windows drive and application up 100% of time as well.

Here are my options:

• Should I go ahead and mirror the Windows drive and keep the database on that drive?

• Just use normal HDD and use a Ghost to keep a running "copy" of the drive in case it fails?

• Use SSD drive for Windows (are they more reliable?)

What do you think I should do?

 

[RebateMonger]

Assuming we aren't talking about Clustering here, the standard way of getting highest uptime is to use RAID 1. You can still have OS corruption, though, and RAID won't help there. That's where an ongoing disk image backups come in handy. That minimizes the time to restore the server's OS and applications.

Yeah, I'd likely just use a single mirrored set of drives and keep both the OS, applications, and data on it. You can always partition the mirrored drives if you want to keep the OS and the data on different partitions. Just be careful to make the OS partition PLENTY large. It's common to undersize the OS partition and fixing it is not trivial.

 

[ThePiston]

only problem I have with that is the performance hit of using a busy DB on the same drive as the OS...

 

[RebateMonger]

You didn't say how many users, what kind of drives, or how busy the disks are. You could look at the Performance Monitor and get some idea of how busy the drives are now.

 

[ThePiston]

10 users on SQL database. Not that busy, but when someone runs Antivirus, defrag, etc the entire systm takes a hit.