wanted: suggestions for dual xeon/scsi mobo, etc

[TP]

i am looking to go as affordable as possible.. I am looking at a seagate 36GB 10K rpm drive.. and would like to go as low as possible on the 533FSB xeon's (is it the 2.4's?).

also we are intending to run Windows 2000 or 2003 Server on this rig.. i had a friend tell me that it's a hard thing to install and run these on a scsi drive.. is this true?

also, does it make much of a difference if you are running scsi on a Promise Card as opposed to a controller on the motherboard itself? my friend was saying it would be better to run the OS on a ata100 ide drive and then run the rest of our stuff on the scsi.. any thoughts on this?

thanks for the input.. my lack of knowledge in the server arena is starting to make me think maybe i should just get a dell or something.. lol.. well hopefully i can get some facts.. if i can get it done cheaper than dell and know that i am building a good system.. then its a good call.. at this point it seems like the "if" is getting bigger..

 

[mechBgon]

I installed a 180-day trial copy of WinServer2003 on a system yesterday, with a $42 LSI Logic U160 card and my old 9GB Atlas 10k SCSI drive. WinServer2003 already has the drivers for my card, so it was no more difficult than installing on IDE. Otherwise you would simply need to have the driver on a floppy diskette and press the F6 key at the beginning of Setup. This holds true whether the SCSI controller is onboard or plug-in... if Windows doesn't have drivers for it, put 'em on a diskette and press F6 at the beginning of Setup when prompted.

Performance-wise, with one or two drives, it's not going to make much difference what you use. In some cases, a single U320 drive may perform better using the U160 protocol, in fact (as shown by a test at XBit labs). When you start getting three+ drives on one bus, more headroom = better.

Remember that a 100MBit network connection is to a hard drive as a drinking straw is to a garden hose. The hard drive can pump out data waaaaaaaaaay faster than the network can take it. If you'll be using gigabit, then your hard drive will probably be the limiting factor, yes.

For a core platform, what about a Tyan Tomcat K8S, an Opteron 140, a couple of 512MB Corsair Registered ECC PC2700 modules and an Antec Plus1080AMG case/PSU? Monarchcomputer.com has those items, as well as plenty of Xeon goodness too. Another place with lots of Xeon boards is Mwave.com.

 

[Peter]

You shouldn't get onboard SCSI. Get a card instead (e.g. Tekram's 390U4W, a real bargain, but still a high performance dual channel U320 card!). Your SCSI stuff will survive at least a couple of mainboard updates.

You want to look at Opteron solutions as well - particularly those that use the AMD chipset and have fast and wide 64-bit 66 MHz PCI slots and busses. You want I/O and RAM bandwidth.