There is this P.O.S server I was working on that had a software mirror of the drive on a single drive with 2 partitions. The first partition mirror'ed onto the second with Microsofts software mirroring CONFIGURED. Is there any benefit to splitting a HD and mirroring it?

To me it stood out as extremely STUPID! Questions I came up with is like ok here is a $2500 P.O.S server and they couldn't stuff an extra 72GB SCSI drive into it when there is clearly space for it? Is there any performance benefit at all to this whole situation since the drive is working twice as hard to populate 2 partitions with LIKE data mirrored? ( I wouldnt think that seek time would be quicker if the head was in the correct position to pick up the data on partition 2 sooner than 1 in a mirror? )

My thoughts are that maybe this was clearly a marketing scam to offer false sense of data protection. On a single drive all your eggs (data) are still in the same basket, and yes it is mirror'ed, but it wont help you in a drive failure unless its only 1 partition or sector that gets hosed and not the other etc.

So does everyone see this the same way that I do that its a half ###'ed server that is a false mirror?If the HDD fails...mirroring is worthless...
Someone sold them a bill of goods.Only 1 reason I can think of: automatic data backup. Not a good way to do it but better than nothing. Hard drives are so cheap now, it makes no sense to backup a partition on the same drive. Also, I notice it's a 72GB SCSI drive. They were much more expensive than ATA or SATA drives. Knowing the age of the POS server would help to explain it. I suspect it predates SATA, so SCSI was much faster than ATA (IDE).It MIGHT be required to fall within PCI regulations. They have some funky requirements.Yes its a SCSI 72GB (fast) single drive. Server is about 5 years old.

And BC... "PCI complaince"... interesting if mirroring is required, and this is a build to be compliant even though it goes against the sole purpose of a mirror to have data on 2 drives.. Going to dig into the PCI Compliance stuff to see where that leads.

The site has been hardened within the last year for PCI Compliance in which firewalls were added to isolate the POS traffic from regular user network traffic etc, and the POS network is now no longer on the same wire ( different isolated segment ) vs riding on same switches etc with alt IP's, isolated behind firewalls, and servers now have to be behind lock and key because of temporary CC number storage issues.

They use to plug computers and servers into whatever network port they could find and have everything running on the same network, users GETTING DHCP addresses and the POS running on static IP's of a different IP address. Lots of issues with too many switches adding latency as well as bandwidth issues where one person is hogging the network pulling up a access database report or power point presentation and then your POS transactions are also trying to get their packets back and FORTH to the servers that keep track of in house charge accounts etc. Needless to say it was a BIG MESS until I started fixing it all from what some other people created. And the network closets were a rats nest nothing labelled just a pile of cat 5 cables and some older BNC stuff for scales all intertwined.

Even worse is that they would have vendors plug their laptops into this same network to get online, but no one monitored for any rogue vendors trying to sniff packets or test for insecurities. Also lots of network ports in areas where people could sneak into and plug in and hack away without being noticed such as switches with open ports available around storage space out in open to see, and hiding places behind pallets of stuff. Someone could have plugged their own cable in and sat hidden behind the stuff and poke away at the network if they wanted and go undetected. So we had to add metal cages to these as well as replace dumb switches with smart switches to block foreign hardware connections and shut off unused ports.

The location is a not-for-profit cooperative food store, so things there were run differently than a regular corporate type of food store.