Hi,

I'm helping a friend of mine who has a small datacenter in San Jose make some purchasing decisions in expanding hgis offerings and buying new computers for dedicated servers to rent out. Not a huge operation - but growing and he wants to make the right choices.

He is somewhat conservative. Even SATA is a little new/scary for him. I'm a little on the bleeding edge side not afraid to screw with the latest and greatest stuff on the few servers I own. What I'm looking for is a middle ground of stable/reliable but newer that what he's running now - and with customer acceptance in mind.

Currently he's got Celeron/P4/Xoen servers in his mix now and using mostly IDE drives. I have receintly become an AMD convert as it seems to me that AMD is just a lot more value for the money and uses far less power which is a significant cost factor at MAE-West. So I'm thinking Semptron/Athlon/Athlon X2/Opterons. But - what customers want/accept is important - and tryin to figure out what kind of customers we want to attract.

So - getting to the point - lets start with hard drives. IDE vs. SATA - I think SATA replaces IDE and that there's no reason not to run just SATA. Cost is similar. SATA is a little faster - more modern - thin cables - and master/slave goes away. Down side - drive names /dev/sdx instead of /dev/hdx and I don't think they have SMART working with Linux yet.

So - thoughts on drives? What is best - and what do customers want?

CPUs - more controversial - I think AMD has significant advantages over Intel. But - Intel still wins on market acceptance. What are customers asking for? And - do I want to focus on a certian type of customer?

Cases - He has an interesting mix of an oddball 1U and some desktop cases he got cheap. The desktops fit 2 wide in the racks. I'm thinking something in between. There's a small desktop type case that's about 4 inches wide and holds 2-3 drives and I think we can get them 3 wide in the racks. Because they have more room that 1U sould be more reliable is my thinking.

So - in general - if you were buying new stuff today - whay would you all buy and why?

Thoughts?