>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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for starters, the bottleneck is usually the net connection to the workstation. the server can be fast, the workstation can be fast, but if you request a lot of data afrom the server, there is only so mutch at the time which can go through a 10/100 cat5 cable. so 1 of the major impovements if you have a 10 TBase connection to the workstation would be to switch to 100 TBase.

>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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i don't know, i've been running on NT4 for years and it works GREAT, wy upgrade?

>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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dual proccessors are only good for software written for dual. anything else will not make a difference, even if you have 4 proccessors. since you are only serving data, i don't see an advantage.
the proccessor will always be at 100 when the cpu needs to work, because the server will look at all the request and other work to be done and try to give the most it can, that's why you see the cpu often at 100%.

>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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there are (i think) up to 5 different raid levels. i work with raid5. the disadvantage is you need 3 exact same hard drives. the humangous advantage is they are hot swapable, that means if 1 HD fails, the other 2 HD always have enough data to recreate the 3rd HD, therefor no datalos in case of an HD crash (ofcorse if 2 crash at the same time you are still in trouble - allways backup).
so this would be a question of data security not speed.

>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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memory is alway good. the usage here depents a lot on the seeting/fine tuning of the NT OS, but for servers i would go to 512MB minimum.

>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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scsi will give you a lot more speed in access and write time, however, you will have to go to the higher speeds to get an advantage to the IDE 7200 RPM. the slowest scsi (i think) are at 7200 RPM, so only a faster scsi will be a speed advantage.

>I will be using a linksys gigabit NIC card, so the network speed shouldnt be an issue.
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i don't know about those. please correct me if i am wrong but those are the 'new' 1000 TBase NIC right? if so, thats great.

>I'm just looking for a no frills foxpro file server, to serve my fox apps as fast as possible. No SQL.

Bottom line: it realy depents how much the 30 users of yours a pounding the server, i have worked mainly with a 50 user net and they are pounding it pretty good. i have speeded the thing tremendelsy up by changing from 10 to a 100 TBase, and changing from a pentium 400 PC type server to a NetFinity IBM 500 server. instead of taking 2 hours for the payroll they now do it in 10 minutes (1000 employees)
another speed improvment will be if you can run the applications from the workstation and realy only serve the pure data from the server. many companies i have seen just install everything on the server and create a shortcut to the .exe on the server, twice as much work for the server to serve.

i hope that helps a little.