>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?
>

I guess the advantages is the stability and security. I don't know whether you can get any advantages of using ADS. But one thing for this is, usually when you upgrade the software you must upgrade the hardware also. So you will loose more money if you upgrade to W2K.


>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.

Yes. You will have a big boost performance if at least you use 2 HD and use RAID 0 (think like you have double bandwidth). But to use level 0 is risky. Because the risk of losing data is greater than normal HD setup (no RAID).
If you use RAID 5+0 than you have to spent much money to buy many HD, but this is the best cause it's offer you a performance & strong protection.
My suggestion is to use RAID 1+0. This level also offering performance & protection, eventhough the protection is not as strong as RAID 5+0, you can consider it a good protection. If you want to achieve a boost performance and protection using RAID 1+0, you must at least use 4 HD.
And you better use a full PCI RAID Controller, not from an onboard one.


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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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If you stay with NT4, 512 is enough. But if you upgrade to W2K maybe you need more than that


>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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Yes, current IDE HD is also fast for workstation. If you use for server the overall performance of IDE will never beat SCSI, iirc SCSI has a better multitasking support than IDE. Even in a single PC you can still "feel" the performance of SCSI.

>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.

It's just my opinion
HTH