building a small data server

I would recomend you start with a Pentiun 3. There cheap,reliable,use verry little power, and run cool.These attributes make it perfect for a server with less than 10 users at a time.If you have more users than that you will need an optatron or xenon.you'll need 256mb ram for linux,or 512 mb for windows server or xp pro to run well.spend most of the money on hard drives, at least 200GB is recomended for a server and if you need data security tape back up.( good high capacity tape drive will cost 500+).As for video cards go just get something cheap like an ATI rage which usually sell for less than $20 after all you'll only need it for setup and system matenence.

That sounds like some good advice dmill89, and the funny thing is I have a P!!! just laying around that I picked up for free off some system fix. What I need is a tut about how to actually SETUP a server, OS wise,etc,etc,etc.

If running windows server or xp pro use the network setup wizard in the con trol pannel.onec you set up the net work go to the drives on the server you want to use and make them shared.(right click drive>properties>shareing)

One would think the most important part of server is speed in sending and receiving data.
I would look to low end duel xeons PIII's
something in the 750mhz range with space for 2gb or maybe 3gb of memory
thay did make ide raid
I'm sure I had a amd server that had it.
put 4 nics in that puppy and team them
nice fast switch like an old 550tr
ebay quad xeon
another
last one but theres more

Whoa.. That thread is old!

So, before the release of Opteron or Xeon, it was impossible to have servers with more than 10 users?

It is possible to have more than 10 users on an older pre-xenon machine it is just relly slow.compared to modern server processers specifically desinged for a large number of users.

Here's the minimum recomended sepcs per users.

1-3 users Pentium 166 or higher (thats the least powerfull processer that can eficently run most modern versions of linux).128 mb ram, atleast 80GB HDD, nic card.
4-6 users Pentium 2 300 mhz, 256 mb ram atleast 140 GB HDD, nic card.
7-10 users Pentium 3 500mhz, 512 mb ram atleast 200 GB HDD,nic card.
10-20 users Single Xenon or Optatron,1GB ram,atleast 400GB HDD,nic card.
20+ users Dual Xenon or Optatron, 4GB ram,atleast 1 TB HDD,nic card.

Hem. For what kind of users? Or are you saying your numbers are valid for any kind of server?

And I hope you didn't get those numbers from a company that sells something.

And are you saying that all servers from 90s having over 10 users were dead slow? Oh my. One starts to wonder how the internet managed to struggle through that..

Take a simple file server. One Samba process instance consumes 4MB of RAM. How does that sum up to 128MB for three users? One can serve 10 users for sure giving plenty of RAM to the OS and system cache with 128MB. That is assuming all 10 users are actually transferring data at once.

Those numbers come from persional experence with file servers as well as experence of IT's I know.Back in the 90's dial up and slow nic cards were the main bottle neck so server speed was not as important but by today's standards it would be extremly slow.
The ram requirements are mainly to run the OS and system processes.
AS well as to help with large file transfer.

Do you actually have experience with all these server classes you proposed? Or do you like to run your servers with every single OS feature installed and turned on?

Are you saying that if I was to serve files to more than 50 users, I need a quad-CPU server with 8GB of RAM or a cluster perhaps?

We run a file server here for 250 users. With "mere" 512MB of RAM and a 1.2GHz CPU. The machine is also a mail gateway and does virus/spam scanning. The bottleneck is still the 100Mbit ethernet and the fact that it takes the clients 10 seconds to open a document locally.

It depends on what type of files you transfer and the speed of your network. In the case of my server files are usually 200mb the system runs red hat and I have a 10/100/1000mbps nic card in all my computers. In the case of my home network 4 but i have done some work at my local HS they have 6 mainframe (big IBM Boxes with 10 CPUs each and 160GB ram) and 8 web servers for 600-1000 users. Home networks and large enterprise scale networks are my main experience in either case the users expect high speed shairing of large files.I relize that depending on your application the specs may verry.

Thank you. So you finally almost admit that the server specs actually depend on what kind of service you are providing and what is the user profile.