Thanks again for the continuing torrent of good information, and thanks to all who have sent me info and details of their experiences off list. I can see that SCSI, particularly with the tagged queueing which Christopher mentioned is going to give great performance, but I just have to rule it out for reasons of cost. I know a lot of you think that IGb per user is over generous, and indeed it is such a big step up from what they currently have that it will cause them no problems if we phase in storage over the next year. However, I feel that to aim significantly lower would be to short change them. My Risc PC has a total of about 3Gb storage. It is full, but it does contain all the Acorn work I've done since 1987. The three year old NT box I replaced last week, on the other hand, had 11Gb of data on it representing just three years work and nothing within that which I feel I could get rid of. Now I know that my requirements are nothing like someone in a school, nevertheless, the fact is that lots of commonly used modern software products produce outrageously large files. The kids (sadly!) use Powerpoint for multimedia, a language lab which produces large quantities of audio files. They use Photoshop in art, Cubase in music and so on. In short, they have every excuse to use up loads of disc space! So, in view of all that has been said, and our severe cost constraints, I think that we might do somthing along these lines. Build 5 machines with plenty of RAM, 4 large IDE drives on hardware IDE RAID controllers. Each machine will be assigned to a year group, and so will effectively stay with a child for their entire stay at school. This should spread the load nicely, and if we site the servers on different segments of the network we can at least go some way to avoid saturating one segment although short of physically replugging things in sync with the school timetable, I don't know how we would optimise this. There might also be some mileage in getting each server to handle logins and dole out Windows profiles for its year group. On the hardware front, I guess the sensible thing is to go for big and fast but not quite leading edge, so that we reap the benefits of commondity prices without paying a premium for the latest greatest stuff. This might mean somthing like AMD1200 processor, 512Mb 133 RAM and so on. Does anyone have a good cheap source of rackmount cases - the ones I've seen always seem to be several times dearer than large tower cases. Cheers -- Phil Driscoll