>Also, what to you mean about "write cache on the file server". Please explain.
>
Most file servers will hold some or all of the data referenced or uodated by its clients in RAM to speed up subsequent references to the data. This would allow the server to simply reference its memory when a piece of data referenced or written by a station recently and make it almost instantly available, without having to pull the information for disk before offering it to the client, which can be orders of magnitude slower than a simple memory reference.

Servers often use a delayed write strategy as well; delayed writes, also known as write caching, allows the system to hold changes in memory while waiting on the slower disk drive to position the heads to the right place on disk, which lets the client requesting the write to proceed almost instantly, without having to wsait for the data to actually be written on the disk itself. Windows uses local disk write caching as a part of its strategy for reading and writing llocal data as well.

There's an element of risk to using a write caching strategy. If a server gets updates to 60 MB of data, and has enough memory available to hold it in cache while waiting on the data to move from memory to disk, there may be a fair amount of information in flux at any given time. if you lose power while some of the data is still held in memory, or have the system hang abruptly, the data might never actually get written to dis, even though your application made the changes and thinks they had been recorded. This can result in various types of data loss and file corruption.

Simple steps, such as ensuring that the server (preferably, all the stations on the ntwork) are on an uninterruptible power supply (UPS), so that if power fails or there's a brownout, the system doesn't crash instantly; instead, it continues to operate off a battery.

The intent of a UPS is to allow the server and workstations to perform an orderly shutdown in the event of power problems, not to continue for a long period of time with the power lines down. While a UPS capable of letting the system operate safely for 5-10m minutes after the power dies is quite reasonably priced (a 300VA UPS, capable of running a PC for 5-10 minutes with the power dead can be had for under $100), and most of the better than bottom-end UPS system include software that will get the systems attached to go through a shutdown automatically in the event of a power failure.

To research UPS systems in a bit more detail, you miught take a look at the web sites for several UPS vendors; www.apc.com is a good site for APC, the makers of the BackUPS and SmartUPS lines of products that I use in house. In addition, there was a great write-up on battery backups for the server marketplace in the April or May issue of Windows NT Systems magazine; their web site is www.ntsystems.com, and they probably still have the article on-line there.