MS Small Business Server 2003

[[GSV]Trig]

Well the idea is its going to do file/printer sharing/exchange and thats about it, for 40 machines..

As for the array its 67Gb over the 4 disks so I think its mirrored/striped but cant get into the damned RAID BIOS to change the damned thing, rather irritating..

Theres also about a 30 seconds login delay as well but looking at Task manager nothings hitting the CPU or the Network, any idea?

Mite see if theres a RAID util for Windows and reconfigure the array n then reinstall..

[Moby-Dick]

Is the machien joined to the domain ? does it have any network card that could be waiting for an IP ?

[[GSV]Trig]

Yes, the machine is setup on the 2k3 box and the machine uses a static ip, its the machine I usually use but I've just added it to the domain but it takes a while to log in for some reason even tho its the only box thats connected atm...

[richman]

Dual CPU ( not just hyper threading or dual core )

We have been looking at xeon chips and it seems alot of them are 533mhz i take it that 800mhz FSB is the better soloution as with any P4 chip, we have found one here which if it is sutible would have 2 of them

See The Chip Here

What about motherboards what motherboard would be suited for this type of setup we have looked into soloutions but only found boards by supermicro with only support for 2 PCI slots which wouldnt allow expansion for extra raid cards.

Thanks in advance
Richard

[Moby-Dick]

FSB isn't going to make as much difference as you'd think. Exatra CPu cache helps , but its not essential . What is more impoartant ( and why I recommended two physical cores ) is the number of threads that can be run , ie the number of operations the system can do at once. When you have 50 users requesting data , you want to keep the wiat queue as low as possible.

There isn't much choice with Xeon motherboards , but Scan have one of the better selections

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...Thumbnails=yes

[richman]

Is their a motherboard that stands out from the rest , becuase as i said lots of them only have 2 PCI slots and only support 533FSB.

Rich

[Moby-Dick]

not off hand - supermicro are probably the biggest manufacturer to retail dual xeon boards though.

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=130608

thats got a bit more than 2 PCI slots. on it

[richman]

Ah yes......

.......1 x 64-bit 133MHz PCI-X (3.3V) slot
2 x 64-bit 100MHz PCI-X (3.3V) slots
1 x 32-bit 33MHz PCI (5V) slot

Iam not sure if PCI-X raid cards/nic cards are available.

Rich

[Moby-Dick]

yes they are - pci-x isn't the same as PCI express.

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=277856

would give you dual channel array support

[richman]

No i know PCI-X isnt the same as PCI-E i mean by dual channel array you mean we can attach two drives to it.

I must thankyou moby for your support during my asking all these questions.

Richard

[Moby-Dick]

nope - dual scsi means you can attach 2 chains to the card - each scsi channel can have a number of devices attached, I think its up to 9 or so - SCSI devices are daisy chained.