Zedric

The company I work for is restructuring the server infrastructure for a customer. There is a good chance that we need to buy two new servers for them, one terminal server and one file server. The terminal server will store most of its data on the file server, so dual gigabit is preferrable.

The terminal server is no big problem, there are good cpu servers out there that don't cost an arm and a leg. The problem is the file server. Basically what we want is a rack server with room for at least 8-10 hot swap drives (storage needs to be about > 1TB and preferrably room to grow). To save some money we really want the disks to be SATA rather than SCSI or the likes. I haven't been able to find this anywhere.

Anyone know where I could find this? Maybe a smaller manufacturer? Building it on our own is not an option due to the whole support mess it brings.

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kcnychief

IMO, you won't find a quality server that has SATA and hot swap capability UNLESS you build it yourself.

That being said, a mission critical server is not something to skimp on wrt to moolah. I personally recommend HP Proliant or Dell PowerEdge servers. Both very high quality in perforamnce and stability.

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LordOfLA

We had to build a server ourselfs to give us 4.5TB hot-swap RAID5 SATA storage.

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Zedric

Well I guessed as much. Thanks anyway. And yeah, kcnychief, I agree about the skimping. But I don't set the budget.

It's just that SATA drives come in huge sizes cheaper than SCSI in smaller sizes. Less drives means less hot swap bays (big chassis cost $$$) and should mean less trouble just due to the number of drives. But then again, SCSI probably have a much better MTTF.

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LordOfLA

SATA has higher MTBF, lower cost and in a RAID array performs almost as fast.

The only difference really (without getting into the technical side) ios the I/O Bus and the rotation speed

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