we're in the process of implementing Revit (structure) and were curious if anyone has run into problems with the whole central file.... server set-up ?? we've gotten conflicting opinions that if your server is running RAID 5 you run a relatively high risk of corrupting files. anyone running RAID 5 ? any problems ? here are two responses we've gotten from Autodesk on the subject. Ultimately, Raid-5 (Parity with striping) is not a good file system to run Revit on. The reason for this is that Revit's RVT file is really more like a relational database, (read: asynchronous random access) where different users are changing segments of the file, than a flat file (like with DWG) where the data is stored in memory them committed to disk in one function. This is how multiple people are able to work on a single central file all at the same time. Raid-5 uses an array of drives to store information with redundancy (parity) so that if one drive completely fails, you could unplug it and continue on working with only decreased future storage space as a loss. Then when you replace the drive the data is rebuilt across all of them again and your free space comes back. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks) As you can now imagine: On the application level we are accessing a single file with multiple entry points and changes that expects to be written to a flat file system via standard windows OS calls. But the raid5 system at the hardware level is trying to sync and copying this delta change in the RVT file (any any other file accessed at the same time) across multiple other physical drives in the background, so the potential for the raid system to corrupt a RVT central (or local stored on it) is very high. second response : Except for buggy implementations [on the raid hardware], see no reason in principle to avoid RAID 5. I advise only against RAIDs that have reduced fault tolerance, namely RAID 0. I don't believe server speed to be a big bottleneck for Revit yet. I would recommend against a super-high performance server for r2008 and earlier versions of Revit. And with the way hardware prices fall, if r2009 will benefit from a super-high performance server, *that* will probably be the right time to invest in them, not now. So with this my suggestion would be to definitely avoid Raid-0 and if you want to play it safe Use Raid 1-4. this is mostly over my head so i thank anyone/everyone in advance for any insight they can provide me on this subject.
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