RAID - help

[tglake]

I've got a slow Access database and am looking to upgrade my server. the main option I have is RAID 0 versus RAID 1.

Is the striped RAID 0 going to give me a significant improvement in performance for the clients?

I'd prefer to have the resilience of RAID 1

RAID 5 is currently not an option.

Views?

 

[loop]

RAID 0 gives you a great perforance upgrade because it allows you to read and write to all drives at the same time so three hard drives equals three times the read and write speed but is not fault tolerant
RAID 1 is just mirroring no perforance on writing but allows for faster read speeds because it reads from all drives at the same time but it writes to the first drive then writes it to the second drive i belive this is not fault tolerant either because you have to restart the computer and choose to boot from the other computer but it does give you a backup of all files on the first
so if you are good a recovering data RAID 1 is great but keep a look out for another job

 

[Capricorn]

This is probably a better topic for the Operating Systems and Software forum, but I you might get better performance from your Access database with RAID 0. I would be surprised if it were drastic improvement though if you've already got reasonably good single drives (7200 RPM SATA or even IDE). There's some faster 10,000 RPM SATA drives you could look into as well if your system supports SATA drives. You might also consider SCSI, but that's pretty expensive. RAID 1 (on most newer cards and motherboards) will give you improved read performance (similar to RAID 0), but nearly the same or slightly slower write performance than a single drive. The advantage to RAID 1 is that since it writes the same data to both drives, you don't loose any data if one of the pair goes down.

Access can be a memory hog, too, so adding memory might have more effect. I'll assume you've already done whatever optimization you can inside of Access (adding indexes, etc.) (I don't work with Access databases that much, so I'm not familiar with what it offers in the way of tuning.)

 

[Inaris]

IS SQL out of the question on this? honestly the improvement is so far and above when working in databases, the time to convert should be looked at over the cost of adding new hardware.
As to the RAID options, if you can't use RAID5, then don't use it. The problem is that if you loose a drive in a striped setup, the data is gone. If you use RAID1, you won't get a performance boost. so you are still at the same spot you are now.
If that data is that important, then I would look to SCSI with RAID 5. Depending on the size of the data, your time and money would be better spent on those avenues.