I am a newbie who needs some help.

Which dedicated server is better:

Dual P-II 400's
8 GB IDE
50 Gb transfer/mth

OR

P-III 550
9 GB SCSI Drive
50 Gb transfer/mth

* It will be used to host about 10 small websites.
* It will also be used to host an online service site which basically involved execution of Perl scripts at our site. We would expect traffic to be high for this service.
* The difference of 1Gb space is not an important factor to me.

Appreciate

How much RAM?

512 Mb RAM
Non-ChiliSoft
$299/mth
$500 setup

Sorry, forgot to say that the RAM, bandwidth and prices are the same for both packages.

$299/mth
$500 setup

For that you can do a lot better than both packages mentioned, maybe even if it's fully managed...

From the techincal point of view (not financial), which is better? Why?

I'd say go with the SCSI. Sounds like the single P3 550mhz should be plenty for your needs. Like Tazzman said though, you could do better for those prices, though I'm guessing there's some missing info related to them ;)

IMHO the one with SCSI is better. I always choose SCSI if I have choice from IDE and SCSI.

Probably the SCSI, altho the dual would be nice, the rest of the server specs (ie HDD) are not that to be desired

Thank you, folks. Can you please tell me why the SCSI is better? I heard that it is faster.

Supposed they both use the same hardisc, then would Dual P-II 400's or single P-III 550 better? Why?

Sorry for my simple questions.

SCSI has greater speed and that's why they're better. You may ask then "How speed of the HDD related to server?" and the answer would be "When you have IDE HDD(s) on your server and about 50 people loading pages at the same time from your server then you get about 100% server load because IDE is rotating inside and it cause high load. When you have SCSI HDD(s) on your server and about 100 people or more loading pages from your server at the same time then you don't get load, maybe 5% server load because SCSI are faster and so on.." This examples will work not only when someone loading pages from your server but SCSI and IDE are different in all situations when process on server using HDD and of course SCSI is better.
Sorry for poor english.

Also try to take working IDE and SCSI HDDs in your hands and you'll feel SCSI

Scsi drives spin faster thus making access times shorter. Scsi drives are also built to last longer and take a bigger beating, thats why their warranty is longer than IDE drives.
Most scsi drives are good idea with a raid configuration, especially hardware raid card with a 64bit bus. But then again you will need at least 1 more drive to do the most basic raid config which is mirroring at raid 1.

Scsi drives uses less cpu load/usage when accessing data compared to IDE.

Originally posted by Cephren
Scsi drives spin faster thus making access times shorter.


How so? I bet that 9GB of SCSI is a 7200rpm SCSI. So if the IDE is also 7200rpm, then both drives will spin the same.

Scsi drives uses less cpu load/usage when accessing data compared to IDE.

Have you really tested this yourself or you just hear this somewhere? I myself would really love to see the benchmark on this, it might be true SCSI outperforms IDE few years ago, but with the new DMA technology, and the fact that now you can have ATA133 or even higher, the performance gap may not as much as one would think of.

regards,
-dave

Originally posted by Miha
SCSI has greater speed and that's why they're better.


Which SCSI? There are SCSI-1, SCSI-2, SCSI-3, fast, wide, ultrawide ... which scsi? Also, now you also have ATA133 (133 mbps) which should be faster than some older SCSIs.

You may ask then "How speed of the HDD related to server?" and the answer would be "When you have IDE HDD(s) on your server and about 50 people loading pages at the same time from your server then you get about 100% server load because IDE is rotating inside and it cause high load.


I have always be intriqued to know this so I setup MRTG to minitor my disk activity vs. server load. Unless if I do this wrong, the server load at the highest peak is not due to the hard drive activities (ther server is doing quite a lot, about 140000 average page views daily. It's a VB forum with sometimes 500+ users online at the same time); there are many other factors that contribute to server load much more than hard drives activity.
What I've learned, for the same amount of disc avtivity, better tunning on apache/mysql will improve a server load quite a lot. I can see this from my MRTG plot of my server load on daily basis ...
So, I would like to learn how you do your study/comparison.


When you have SCSI HDD(s) on your server and about 100 people or more loading pages from your server at the same time then you don't get load, maybe 5% server load because SCSI are faster and so on.."


Again, have you done this comparison yourself? I am really want to have these kind of numbers, but on a systematic study.

regards,
-dave

Thank you again, guys. Your feedback is very valuable to me. Appreciate.