Hi Steve,

It sounds like things are at least 'reasonable' as they are now. Nevertheless, trying to put myself in your position, here's what I'd look at...

I've never had the opportunity to work under NT4, but it IS old and getting support (recently announced) only to Dec 31, 2004. But I've heard many here say that they are happy to be rid of NT in favour of Win2000 or WinXP. Win2K or XP will also support new things like USB2.

I don't know how old your HDs are, but there have been HUGE technological improvements over the last 2 years or slightly less. Not only with the capacity issues, but also with raw speed and reliability and flexibility. It may be that NT4 needs latest SPs or even other fixes to work with some of the capabilities of the newer drives.
I certainly look at getting new hard drives. I've always liked SCSI myself, but I must admit that my current desktop does use a IDE drive as C: (my SCSI relegated to E:, but it's older anyway). But I am firmly convinced that the thing to look for in any new HD is the number of platters/surfaces and the number of R/W-heads. I'd go for the most of each, even if I didn't need all of the space that comes in that case. The price difference is usually not that big, but the extra bytes per cylinder can make a good performance difference. For example, MAXTOR has a line of IDE drives ranging from 20GB to 80GB. The 20/40/60/80 units have 1/1/2/2 platters respectively and 1/2/3/4 RW-heads respectively. I'd go for the 80GB simply because of the 4 R/W-heads. I understand that 15,000RPM SCSI drives may have smaller platters (to be able to spin that fast) but more of them (to have competitive capacities). The important thing is to check that out - it may take some heavy Googling.

A new system will give you benefits like more RAM capability, faster RAM capability (variations of DDR) and some other stuff. Depending on the mhz of your current system, you may not 'need' dual processors in a newer system, the mhz being plentiful on those and the more expensive later Intel jobbies having some kind of threading capabilities in their single-processor versions.

These are just some thoughts, and other with more/deeper experience with busy/larger servers will hopefully have other considerations for you.

have fun. My bet is that the cost will be most reasonable for something new and very very good.


>I maintain a small network of 30 workstations. My boss has finally gave me the money to upgrade our file server. Times are tough and I really dont want to spend money unless it's going t be an improvement. I don't run any applications on the server. The server is used to share my foxpro data and control who logs in to which workstation.
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>Any suggestions at all on hardware/software.
>I'm leaning towards saving some money and just staying with our NT4 for the OS. Are there any performance advantages to upgrading to 2000 server, or small business server?
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>Since I am only serving up files, would I see a major improvement with dual processors. I expect so, because when I copy large files to/from my server, the CPU monitor pegs out at 100%.
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>I understand the concept of RAID, but what's the bottom line. Is there a noticable performance increase for serving up my fox apps.
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>The old sever has 256mb of memory and according to the performance monitor, it uses nearly nothing, remains flatline all the time. I assume this is becuase there are no applications running on the server, it just serves up files. SO I am thinking of maybe just 256 or 512; i think is a standard bare amount.
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>SCSI or IDE, since sharing files is the big issue here, I think SCSI is the best way to go, even though the new IDE's are faster than they use to be.
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>I will be using a linksys gigabit NIC card, so the network speed shouldnt be an issue.
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>I'm just looking for a no frills foxpro file server, to serve my fox apps as fast as possible. No SQL.