Server spec take a peek

gary996

gary996

gary996

Soldato
Joined
24 Aug 2003
Posts
3,449
Location
Gillingham Kent
Putting together a server for a business. Going to need 2 of them. Running server 2003 small business and server 2008. Will put the hard drives in raid 1.

Comments please


 
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1 is to run the office side of things so storage possible mail server
2 is to run the school office (same as above) and also to run a web police software to stop the boys viewing/downloading porn etc
 
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Firstly why are you going to running SBS 2003 and Server 2008, why don't you just run SBS 2008? You can then use a single more capable machine.

I would never build a production server from desktop parts. Do yourself a favour and buy a real server with a decent on site warranty. Judging by your original spec your looking at spending over £1000 on two desktop machines, this should be enough for a single real server.

For servers the disk subsystem is much more important than the processing power. With what you've spec'd the processors will probably spend most of their time idle waiting for the disks to catch up. Unless the server is basically doing nothing I'd always aim for 10K, or preferably 15K, SAS or U320 SCSI drives and a decent hardware RAID adapter. As mentioned you don't need dedicated graphics for a server.

I can't see any mention of either a backup solution or UPS protection, you'll need to allow for both within your budget.

To provide any detailed suggestions we'd need to know what the server(s) will be doing and how many users you're expecting to support. A machine just providing file and print to five users is going to be significantly different to one running something like Exchange or SQL Server for fifty.
 
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Yeah get a seagate 7200.10 for realiability :S the newer ones have a bit of a problem atm :( which is a shame coz seagate are usually bullet proof.
 
Non of the 7200 series drives are targeted for servers.

Desktop drives are optimised for single user access patterns not for the random access patterns a server drive needs to cope with.

If budgets necessitate SATA drives then you'd be better with something like the Barracuda ES.2 or the WD RE2.
 
I've heard that the problems are absent from the 7200.12s, but how can we know for sure so soon after launch?

I'd go for 7200.10s or one of the newer WD drives.
 
As said above a dedicated server with 10k drives and then budget for backups (Really important!)

should do the job better
 
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