Topic: Server upgrades, am I on the right track?

I know I can always get good advice here. I recently started working full time at a doctor's office in a combination of IT / billing. We're moving to Electronic Medical Records next month and I'm tasked with upgrading and re-purposing one of our servers. We're currently using a single hard drive in a dell power edge with 4gb of ram and windows server 2k3 as a terminal server for 11 of the ~35 systems on our network. We're replacing the thin clients with towers and adding a raid 5 configuration to the server and using it as an image server for the scanned charts. Here's a rough outline of my plan of action:

1) purchase a raid card and 3x 1tb hard drives, possibly more ram
2) back up everything on the server to two external hard drives, and possibly a tape backup system (just in case)
3) use something like norton ghost (recommendations?) to clone the system to the new raid configuration

anything to watch out for? anything I'm blatantly neglecting?


Do you serve a purpose or purposely serve (Corey Taylor)

(Edited by I X I on 11-18-2011 04:18)

I don't know if 3 will actually work.

Keep in mind that a degraded Raid 5 is just as bad as a single disk (arguably, more so) until it has synced a new disk.
So for real high tolerance, you need to have a spare disk in the system.

You should also have a regular backup plan, as opposed to the one time backup you're going to do before the move.
And no, a raid is not backup.

so long,

->Tyberius Prime

Thanks for the reply, TP.

I have read about the downsides of a RAID 5 configuration, such as lower read/write times should a single drive fail and the vulnerability until the data from the failed drive can be rewritten to a replacement. I'm wondering if it would be possible / how difficult it would be to set up a combination RAID 5 / RAID 1. If it would be possible to mirror what's on the RAID 5 to a single drive with the option to upgrade that single drive later. Any thoughts?


Life is too short, so love the one you got (Bradley Nowell)

Now that I'm back in the office and have done some more research on the server we have...

We have a PERC 5/i Serial Attached SCSI controller already installed. I'm curios to know if something like http://www.cablestogo.com/product.asp?cat_id=940&sku=10250 would be a viable option. I'm trying to do this in the most cost-effective manner, and if that splitter would allow me to set up the desired configuration without purchasing a SATA RAID controller then it would certainly be cheaper.


I focus on the pain; The only thing that's real (Trent Reznor)