Harware advise for new win 2003 server

[lonestar36]

Hi: I have a limited budget to upgrade our server. We have about 234 devices in a small k-12 school. I am trying to decide if it would be best to buy a server with 2 Xeon 2.8 Ghz CPU's and 2 80 Gig ATA 100 7200 RPM hard drives running raid 1 or buy a single 2.8 GHz CPU with 2 18.2 Gig SCSI 15,000 rpm hot swappable hard drives running raid 1.
My gut feel is the SCSI will give me better overall system performance.
I plan on keeping the old server as a print server.
Thanks in advance for you inputs.

 

[TechLad]

If your only using the new server for File storage then a single processor is sufficient.
I notice the difference in drive size (80gb vs 18gb) so I assume that drive space is not an issue - obviously this may tip your hand one or the other if it will become an issue later.
From my perspective I always scope SCSI drives into servers, but do tend to use RAID5 over other RAID types (except in specific application servers), I also use a hardware RAID adapter, this again increases performance over software RAID.

Hope this helps


Remember: Backups save jobs!!!
;-)

 

[lonestar36]

Thanks for the input. At this time storage space is not a consideration, however at some time in the future I would like to have space for each student to login to and save data as their own. Right now they have one login "student" and data is saved on the local computer. (I need to learn how to implement login scripts) This limits them to working on one computer and if they don't finish an assignment during the class period they have to save to floppy to work on it in the open labs or finish next day. My thought was to have a large (160 GIG) ATA hard drive for that purpose. This should not pose a speed problem as they will only be saving data at a low rate. Thats why I would like to have speed for search on the WEB. We have T1 line for internet access.

 

[dkediger]

In the absence of any server apps (SQL, Exchange, IIS) I would prioritize DISK->RAM->CPU.

I would be very sensitive to the quality and specs of the drives - both SCSI and ATA, that you're looking at.

A good hardware SCSI controller would provide a better expansion solution down the road - you just add drives; with the ATA drives, unless you're buying an add in controller, you've got limited expansion options and the controller is likely already saturated with data.