I'm looking for some good file servers for my business, but I can't afford $40K compaq servers! :eek: I found these people who are cheap, but I don't know if they are any good. Has anyone ever used them before?

http://www.rthdata.com/storage

I've checked eBay, but once again they are very expensive. :mad: Can anyone recommend anything?

Thanks!

How much space do you need? Those rigs are 1 terabite and bigger. Thats a lot of file storage. I havent priced all of these parts in detail today but:
Barebones box= about $150
Pair of 250G hdds= about $500
AMD 2800= about $250
512 PC3200= about $150
other minor components= about $200
Thats about $1250 to $1500 for .5 terabites of storage.?.

It seems like a lot of money for what you get - but then I must be missing something when http://www.costcentral.com/proddetail/SUPERMICRO_SUPER_P4_SCi/MBDP4SCIB/D00011/ is 10 times the price of http://www.costcentral.com/proddetail/SUPERMICRO_SUPER_P4_SCi/MBDP4SCIO/D00010/ and yet they seem almost identical. What am I missing?

Some more info about your network size and complexity and the amount of data you would keep on the file server would all help to advise you better.

Well, I just did some more detailed checking and although I was fairly acurate on my price, I was abit off on specs-
Intel 3.0Ghz with 1Gb L2 cahce
2 300 Gig SATA drives
Asus mobo (up to 4Gig RAM)
2 Gig Coursair PC3200, 800FSB Xtreme (low latancy) RAM
Plain Jane case (it is a file server)
simple vid card and a couple other minor items, about $1350+ shipping & tax.

Seems like a pretty capable machine to me :D
HOLY MOTHER OF CHRIST :eek:
Paul, i just looked at your links, $2000.00 for a motherboard???? AND THEY ARE OUT OF STOCK????? LMOA, it says "This item not rated, be the first to rate this product", or something to that effect. :P

Boy, I don't know. Those prices seem a little high to me, but then again the Windows Server OS might figure into the price. ;) Also, the 3U rackmount cases on those other ones. 8 hot-swappable drive bays, huh? Cool!

Of course, you know what we're going to say. It would be cheaper to build one yourself, and possibly better if you know how to do it. I helped my friend this past weekend build a server for his college, and I helped him configure it. The total cost was well below $4500, but we didn't put 1TB in there, either. Just a nice Socket 939 file server (Athlon64 3500+), using an Antec 4U rackmount case (no hot-swappable drive bays), 1GB DDR400, GF4 MX440 vid card (because the mobo had no onboard video, and yes I know it's overkill for a file server :p), a single 74GB Raptor pulling OS duty, and 2 300GB Maxtors in RAID 1 with 16MB of cache and NCQ. Came in under $1500, but the server OS isn't in that price. The education sector has a unique licensing system with MS, so the college's main IT department handles all OS license roll-outs. So, only 300GB total for main storage, but not a bad price, eh? :cool:

Even if you don't want to build your own (there are many reasons for any business not to build their own servers!) I think you can find cheaper and lesser file servers to meet your needs. If you're balking at a price of $4700, maybe you don't need RAID or hot-swappable drives?