We have a windows 2003 server Enterprise. Running on it is our hospital domain, active directory, dhcp, and MS exchange 2003. The problem that I am having is that the hard drives are now full. I take a look at the folders on the C drive and it doesn’t add up to being full. The sever has 4 40 gig drives running raid 5 so a total of 80gb of hard drive space. The folders on the C drive only add up to about 45 Gigs. Currently the C: drives shows 80gigs with 200MB free. If I reboot the server it then shows 12 gigs free but slowly fills up. There are only two big folders on the server one being the programs folder at 15 gigs and our system wide network folder at 13.8 gigs. One thing that I noticed is that drive 3 in the RAID is failing so I will have to order a new drive and rebuilt it. Do you think that this will solve the problem or is something else going on? This server is critical to our hospital so any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated!! jn

I doubt replacing the defunct drive will fix this. It might, but it's doubtful. If this is a DC and the only DC in your domain, I can see it being full, or mostly so considering how much data is contained within an active directory environment. First and foremost, this should NOT be the only DC in the domain. You should have at the very least, a second DC that has been made redundant to the first. I suspect that since this is a hospital the server and the entire domain are pretty critical. A redundant DC will give you some measure of security should the first DC ever fail. With respect to your present server. You should have the operating system installed on a RAID 1 (mirror) and the data on a RAID 5. You should always avoid installing your OS on a RAID 5 whenever possible. I would replace the defunct drive, do a cleaning on the system to remove unneccessary files, perform a defrag and see where that leaves you. If the problem persists, it's because your OS and AD have outgrown the RAID. I would highly recommend that no matter what else you do, you get a redundant DC installed and working in your environment. If you did this, you could then take down the DC and replace all the drives with larger ones (image the exisiting setup and deploy the image on the new disks) and then bring it back up. I would also highly recommend you do as I described above if you find yourself putting bigger drives in your DC....RAID 1 = OS, RAID 5 = data.

OMG! It's a hospital with THAT setup??? You have got to be kidding. No way any hospital would go with no redundancy either in hardware, OS or software. I work at a hospital so I would know. "The server has 4 40 gig drives running raid 5 so a total of 80gb of hard drive space." No that's not correct. That should be 120gig not 80gig if there were 4 drives in a raid5 array. It could only be if you had 3 drives in a raid5 array. Are you doing hardware raid or dynamic disks? slowly fills up? Do a search on recent file dates and track whats creating files. You should be doing clustering with a shared SAN. At the very least mirrored servers with 8-10 disk arrays. That would be one mirror set for OS and raid10 for data which is 6 drives minimum. Then you configure global hot spares which I would have a minimum of two but better to have more. How many beds in your hospital and I am assuming this is a people hospital? You are way out of HIPAA security compliance if your hospital even knows about it from that setup. Are you ready for where Microsoft wants you to go today?

IDE raid at a hospital? Remind me not to get sick there. At the very least you should have a real server, IDE does not count ad data protection. SANs may be a little overkill for a small hospital two servers is not. 80 could be correct with 4 disk setup. 80gb data (2 drives) 1 drive for parity, and one as a hot spare. Replace that drive asap. you are running with a huge penelty with ide raid 5 running in degraded mode