Our current environment is HP-UX\Oracle\Baan IVc3. We are moving to a Windows 2000 Advanced Server\MS-SQL 2000\Baan IVc4 environment. We are licensed for 30 Baan users, and don't expect much growth.

We're currently in the process of purchasing the server equipment for our new environment. All the experts we talk to about configuring this new environment are recommending that we run a combination of Raid 1 (separate mirrored drives for the OS, and a second set of mirrored drives for the SQL transaction logs/Baan application), and RAID5 for the Baan DB. This configuration adds a significant amount of additional costs when compared to just a RAID5 environment.

Is there anyone out there running just RAID5 in a Windows 2000 Advanced Server\MS-SQL 2000\Baan IVc4 30-user environment? The server I'm configuring is a Dell PowerEdge 2650 with (2) 2.4 GHz Xeon processors, 4GB RAM, and (3) 36GB 15K drives.

A couple of years ago I built a MK Manufacturing ERP server on a Dell PowerEdge 6000 series server with (4) 700 MHz Xeon processors, 2GB RAM, and (5) 18GB 10K drives. The OS was NT 4.0, and the database was CA's Ingres II. My MK user count was 35. This server performed extremely well and did not require the use of RAID1.

Thanks in advance for your responses!!!

Ingres is not Oracle and vice versa. I think the common feeling still is that an Oracle database on RAID-5 is looking for trouble. I can tell from experience, at least for Oracle7/8 running on a HP-Autoraid which started off in RAID-1 and ended up in RAID-5 and alongside with it the performance went down.

RAID-1 is also safer than RAID-5. There is always a maximum to how many disks you can loose before going bust. And don't think you can't loose 2 disks in a day. I remember it happening on a HP FC 60 storage array and it screwed an entire RAID-5 volume.