classiccmp server hardware

Depends what you can lay your hands on. Companies are throwing out machines of only a couple of years old with some pretty high spec hardware in, so the money side isn't always an issue. Complexity-wise, the controller BIOS setup utilities usually take care of the complex stuff and present it in an easy-to-understand way. Where's IDE these days relative to SCSI? For a machine that's processing a lot of mail traffic (and hence a lot of disk I/O) SCSI controllers (RAID or otherwise) were always better than IDE - plus you get the higher reliability, more flexible bus options etc. (I'd expect for flat-out transfers of large files, there's not a lot in it) Not so convinced about that - remember that's bits, not bytes; ethernet isn't *that* fast (relative to other things). Then presumably if you're shunting a lot of small files around (as with a machine hosting a mailing list) then it'll be 1 or more packets per message with the resultant packet overhead. It all adds up pretty quick. As for mirroring to a seperate machine (if that's what you were intending) then disk performance should easily outstrip network bandwidth (and could probably upset the underlying mail software whilst mirroring was taking place) - I'd go for a seperate ethernet link between machines just for mirroring purposes in that case. (Our broken 1U machine at Bletchley actually has three 100MBit interfaces on the motherboard, presumably for this sort of reason) Only Jay knows how much on-line storage he needs, the nature of the data hosted on the server, and how much network traffic the server needs to move though. cheers Jules