One thing to consider is that Intel boards (made by Intel, that is) have an excellent next day warranty replacement. We use the Intel SE7501BR2 server board and it is excellent, but quite expensive.

As for hard drives, I would recommend using a 3Ware SATA RAID controller, but that's just me.

Depending on your needs, you could look at a used Sun server off eBay. I recently purchased a Sun Enterprise450 (quad proc, up to 4GB Ram, 20 HD's) for $500CAN on eBay. The Sun U2 is really nice, as is the U30/U60.

One way to use cheap IDE disks on a Sun is get an Arena drive box from Maxtronics (they are on eBay all the time) and it does internal RAID, but connects to the machine via SCSI. They are very nice, we have 4 of them. You can get the 8 drive one for $600US. It actually works out to be about the same cost as buying a 3Ware controller.

shawn

On 4-May-04, at 1:18 PM, John Lange wrote:

Hello all. I was hoping one of you server types would have a suggestion for a motherboard that would be suitable for use in a server.

Up until now I've built all my machines (including servers) using "off-the-shelf" hardware purchased from CBIT and it has worked great for me. I've been doing it this way for a long time and I've never had any significant problems.

Now I'm looking to build another box and I'm wondering what a good choice of hardware would be.

This box will have at least 1G of RAM and I would like it to have 4 SATA hard drives doing some kind of software RAID.

I'd _like_ dual processors but I'm not willing to quadruple the price of the system just to get it which is also the reason why I've never considered purchasing any of the ready made "server" systems from the likes of Dell, Sun, or IBM. I just don't have the budget for it.

I'm really interested in opinions from other sever admins as to what you use for your boxes.

Thanks.

-- John Lange BigHostBox.com (204) 885 0872

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