I am about to replace my old server. It's a Pentium 166 w/64MB mem and 20GB of storage on SCSI drives. My question is as follows:

1] Currently Pentium 3-600 MHZ servers are selling for about $300. 9GB wide ultra scsi drives are $30. A very capable server w/ 27 GB of storage and 1 GB of mem could be constructed for about $600. Brands available are Compaq, HP, and IBM. All are designed w/fault tollerance and redundancy features built in. Some offer multiple precessor capability(up to 4).

2) I could build an Athlon 64 machine w/twin 160Gig Sata drives and 1 gig mem for slightly more money, but the machine would lack the "heavy duty, fault tollerant design features of the Proleineas etc.

Which would be the best strategy in a 4 user small office environment?

Thanks for your opinions.

What will the server be doing? For e-mail, file serving and domain control your current server is enough. Add some RAM and storage space if needed and it will do fine.

Unless you are running some database then that P166 is enough CPU wise for your needs. With 512 megs of RAM that machine can run 2k3 server or any other server OS just fine if you need a software upgrade.

If you absolutely have to have a new server, buy the cheapest server (builtin SCSI RAID and stuff) you can find and it will be more than those 4 users ever would want.