"George Macdonald" <fammacd=!SPAM^nothanks@tellurian.com> wrote in message
news:3ef796a1.222632773@news.tellurian.com... On Mon, 23 Jun 2003 18:45:13 GMT, "FN" <newsgroupaccount@DELETECAPSyahoo.com> wrote:I'm looking at using one of these Gigabyte motherboards in a custom builtfile server, for a small business...http://secure.newegg.com/app/specification.asp?item=13-128-166http://secure.newegg.com/app/specification.asp?item=13-128-185I'll be using Windows 2000 Server. IDE hard drives will be attached via
aseparate Promise IDE Raid 5 Card. About 1-2 gb of RAM (feel free tosuggest).Does RAM speed matter for this type of file server usage? I gather ECC
ramsupport is good for a server, but I have no idea if I should go with dualchannel DDR 400 or 266? Would the difference be noticeable? Thedifference in the motherboard and the ram easily adds a couple hundreddollars minimum, and I'm wondering if its a waste. Is this a file/print server only?... no database serving? 512MB RAM will be sufficient - 1GB will give some breathing space for future bloat if you wish. For hard disks I'd suggest considering a Promise SuperSwap kit
which will give you failure redundancy plus a near-passive short-term backup by disk swapping - the hot swapping works well but you have to be ultra careful about grounding yourself, no matter the weather, before touching the drive with the key... not sure if swapping goes with RAID-5. I still have a PII/450 in our W2K file/print server and the only time it really hurts for memory and CPU speed is on Defrags - yes, it *will* be upgraded one of those days.:-) If there's a few spare $$ spend on the
case - I have a Antec SX-1240 (6x5.25" bays) which, AFAIK, has been superseded now but I don't regret spending on it and it has worked out very well. What drives are you considering? I recently switched from IBM 75GXPs to Seagate Barracudas (upgrade from 20GBs to 80GBs) and am seeing no more little disk related glitches and Active Directory recoveries in the system logs... and the Seagates, with FDB, are very quiet. Rgds, George Macdonald "Just because they're paranoid doesn't mean you're not psychotic" - Who,
me??