Is this a good "home made" SERVER?

[MASTOURA]

Well, I plan to build/update a machine, which is going to be used mainly as a Server machine, but also as a client... Please tell me what you think. Thanks.

1) MSI 694D Pro Dual CPU Motherboard
2) Two Intel Pentium III @ 866 Mhz
3) 512 MB of generic RAM (2x256)
4) Maxtor 40 gig Hard Disk Drive (IDE)
5) Hercules GeForce MX (32 MB)
6) SB Live! 5.1
7) Pioneer DVD Rom (x6) SCSI
8) PlexWriter 8/2/20 SCSI
9) Adaptec SCSI Card 2904CD
10) Generic CD-Rom Reader x52 speed
11) Generic Floppy Drive, Mouse and Keyboard
12) Everything will go in a Big Tower with 2 8cm Fans in the back. I don't know if I should add more fans.

I know that I should opt for a SCSI drive, but I am currently low on funds, so I'll have to wait. Besides, the machine is more a "home server" rather than a "business server". In addition, I hope that the Dual CPU will help with tasks. I will use Windows 2000 as the ONLY OS on the system (NTFS) and I'll hope that everything will run with the compatability patch.

So, what do you think about this machine? Is it a good one for a home server/client which will mainly be used for daily tasks, work, multimedia (I have a scanner, a zip drive, a webcam, etc. that I didn't mention above) and SOME gaming? And do you think it will last for a good 2 years?

Thanks a lot for your help,

M.

[Stan]

Hi,

It looks pretty good to me !
This is my home server spec:
- Asus P2B-D with 2 PIII 600
- 384MB SDRAM
- Fastrack RAID IDE with 2 IBM 40GB in RAID1
- Onstream DI30, Pioneer DVD, ZIP 100
- SBlive
- Matrox G400 MAX

It is running Win2000 server. I use it as a Proxy/FW/answering machine.
I don't do any gaming as my Gaming Machine is 5x faster (dual 1GHz, 512MB, SCSI RAID, ...) I use that PC as a file server mainly.

Yours looks really good. Maybe you need some redundancy. A RAID IDE controller will help and they are not that expensive.

Stan

[DemonKnight]

With a DVD and a Burner why do you need another CD-ROM to read from? You could also get the DVD and Burner in IDE format and use that money on a SCSI hard drive.

[DVNT1]

I would suspect that the dual processor is overkill unless your using SQL server or a other multi-processor designed application heavily. Of course if you have the money and want to try it out, then go for it. No harm in learning!
An Raid controller would also provide a good learning experience and performance increase. An IDE Raid controller would be much less expensive than SCSI (including the drives) but wouldn't offer as many features that you could learn from SCSI RAID controllers.

Cheers!

[BBA]

Dual proc is good, mem is good...but for a server, you do not even need a sound card or DVD player ( unless you want to stream DVD content, hahaha http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif ). I can see a burner being good...so you can burn while not interferring with play on your workstation rig. My game/internet server is a single P3 450 at 600, with 320M ram, old vid card and no sound card, and it kicks ****, so yours would be awesome.

With all the components you list...I suspect you will not really use this as a dedicated server.