Cloning a NAS drive which hosts a SQL Server DB
- by Adrian Hand
We have a system in the field running a server application which is suffering with major performance issues.
The system in question has 2 onboard 300gb sas drives in RAID 5 from which it boots Windows Server 2003, and a 6tb buffalo terastation NAS unit (also RAID 5) to which the server app does all of its reading and writing.
I believe the terastation is the source of all our woes. Whilst under load, reads and writes tick by at something of the order of 1meg/sec, though the network in question is hardly utilised.
The terastation contains various data, but crucially hosts a full instance worth of SQL Server .mdf and .ldf files (master etc - the whole shooting match)
I wish to stop all the services on the server, then take everything on the terastation and essentially clone it to some alternative onboard storage, so as to eliminate the terastation from the equation as far as poor performance is concerned. ie the terastation is currently drive D: - I want to copy everything off and then have the duplicate assume the drive letter so that as far as the software is aware, nothing is different.
This is tricky because of the mdf and ldf files - everything else will work with a straight up file copy. Can anyone suggest a means to achieve what I am describing? Many thanks!