I'm afraid I don't know much about SAN's so please forgive my lack of detail or technical terms. As a developer I've just completed and put on an existing production system a new application but it would appear to have tipped the scales regarding the performance of the backups being taken from the SAN. As I understand it there's a mirror of the SAN being taken usually constantly at the block-level. However, there seem to be so many new writes to the disk that the SAN mirroring/backup process can no longer keep up. I believe I've narrowed this down to SQL Servers tempdb which exists on a drive that contributes the largest portion of the problem! In fact I think tempdb has be contributing the largest portion of the issues all along regardless of my application! My question therefore is whether the tempdb should ever be mirrored or backed on the SAN and whether anyone else has gone through this sort of pain already? I'm wondering whether it's a best practise to make sure that tempdb is never mirrored on a SAN simply because any writes to it don't need to be saved. This also raises a slightly connected question - is it better to rely on SQL Servers built-in database backups tools (DB in full-recovery mode with full/differential and transaction log backups) or, as is the case with our application, SQL server is in simple recovery mode and never backed up since the SAN is mirrored and backed up? Many thanks