IBM xSeries Server - Any good?

Paul,

I have only just installed a SBS2000 on an X225 Series.

It has 1 Gb Ram, Xeon 2G Processor, 3 x 36.4 (RAID5 - Hardware- using 5I
Serveraid controller), 2 NIC, 20-40 DDS4 Tape...

So far system has performed well on this...Hardware was pretty easy to
assemble.

Regards
Adam

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I appreciate all the good comments. I suppose it makes more sense to just
get 2 huge IDE drives and mirror them data and all. Will that affect the
performance a ton? The SBS site this will be for is only going to use SBS
for strictly File & Print nothing else.

From what I hear everyone saying, I would like to consider going with SCSI
drives. The reason I am looking at IBM is because a large PC refresh order
will accompany this so we can stick to a single vendor.

Looking at the 225 xSeries with 2-36.4GB Ultra160 SCSI SL HDD's with or
without the 4Lx RAID controller - what does the RAID controller add (is that
the difference between hardware and software RAID?)

I'm also planning on buying the IBM 20/40GB DDS/4 4-mm Internal Tape
Drive(HH), wondering if anyone has had good experiences with this?

Thanks for your input and assistance,

-Paul

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I have SBS on a number of Xseries, but nothing as low as a 205. Our normal
entry level is a 220, with a pair of 18Gb SCSI drives, adding a 4Lx RAID
controller and a third drive for sites with SQL, or more than 10 users. W2K
has a quirk that requires manually killing a process during install when
using an IBM RAID adaptor, (MS bug, not IBM), but other than that they have
worked well for us. The 205 is nothing special, just another clone PC,
although a bit more expensive, well built, and fairly well supported.

SBS is generally bottlenecked by HDD speed, a fast CPU will not compensate
for IDE HDDs.

Mal Osborne

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Paul, if going with IDE drives (which are available in very large
capacities) why not just use two large ones (mirrored) partitioned for both
OS and data. That way both are protected?

You may also want to look at Dell PowerEdge 600SC with 1.8GHz P4 (512mb
cache). If buying new, it would probably be less expensive and better
performing than the IBM.

Pat

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can't comment on the x series but

say a drive fails. which is easier to recover ? your OS or your data ?

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