We're thinking of building a new server box for a 15 workstation SBS 2000 network. I'm wondering if anyone has had expeience using SATA drives in a server environment.

We are a small private non-profit corporation, so funds are limited. We have 4 workstations running Quickbooks & Excel 2002 on the accounting side; the rest of the workstations for program staff mainly use Word and to a lesser degree Excel. Outlook is of course the email client.

<speculation> Our load on the server is relatively light-we have no heavy duty database apps for example, that would stress the network.

Would something like an AMD x64 3400+, 3 Gb RAM and a SATA RAID 5 setup be able to handle the load? There's always the fallback position-if the SATA RAID doesn't work out, they'd end up in my workstation and we'd have to bite the bullet & go SCSI.

Thoughts?

I am currently using dual 250GB SATA drives on a RAID 1 (mirror) in a Small Business Server 2003 server.

Works flawless......No performance issues.

Sounds promising. How many workstations do you have?

I think you should be fine. It should be able to handle 15 users. If you experience performance issues use 2 separate drivers and share the bandwidth that way...