Open Dental Forum

Hi -

I am brand new to Open Dental, but I am setting up a new computer for our startup pediatric dental office. I am planning to set up a RAID 1 on two 1 TB SSD hard drives and I wanted to see if anyone had an opinion on whether it is better to set up the RAID 1 through ASUS BIOS or through Windows 7. Below are my computer specs. Does one way offer more advantages in terms of reliability, efficiency, and quicker switch over if one drive fails?

Computer Specs:
Asus Z97-WS Motherboard
Intel i7 4790K
Crucial 16GB RAM
Corsair RM750 Power Supply
(2) 1TB Samsung 850 EVO SSD - Used for RAID setup
(1) 120GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD - Used for Windows 7 Pro and Open Dental Software

Thank you,

We've had many customers with bad experiences using RAID set ups on their server. RAID is not a backup solution and should not be relied on for backups or disaster recovery plans. With that in mind, if this is just a beefy workstation set up, I would suggest going through the ASUS BIOS.

Open Dental is extremely simplistic so using backup softwares are more than sufficient. Then it becomes a question of do you want to manually do them or have them done automatically?
http://www.opendental.com/manual/backupsonline.html
http://www.opendental.com/manual/backupsmanual.html

I would advise skipping RAID as well. Just use software to copy your data from one 1TB drive to the other a couple times a day and it will be MUCH easier to restore from a failure. (I still use the the old "Karen's Replicator" for duplicating data in this fashion to other computers for extra backup!) RAID is a real pain when it comes to failures. I have dealt with it twice and decided last time was the end as I found it easier to just start over from other backups.

Skip the raid and use VMware to run your server in a virtual machine and easy to have rock solid backups avail in seconds on another computer if computer crashes.

Thank you for all the advice. Much Appreciated. I think the consensus is to skip the RAID.

Dr. Maximus - Does VMware host and run OpenDental virtually or just the patient database is hosted in the cloud. Do you have any problems with bandwidth by doing this? Comcast service may claim 50 or 100 MBPS, but rarely is it ever consistent. Any issues uploading x-ray images or accessing them quickly?

Do you keep any of the records locally as well?

Which service(s) do you use from VMware?

Thank you