Thanks for the deluge of responses: Further info/answers to questions posed: The school is an ordinary state sector secondary school with no 6th form, so takes years 7 to 11. The majority of the ICT use seems to be class groups hence big spikes in the load are to be expected at the start and end of lessons. Currently we need to cope with 100 -> 150 concurrent connections but I would be surprised if this doesn't double over the life of the server. The data *is* serious enough to need backing up. I don't think that hot swap is a necessity - as long as the system will keep working with one duff drive which can be swapped out of school hours, that is good enough. Sharing the load between servers on a 'per year group' basis will probably be too expensive, although splitting across two servers may ba acceptable. SCSI vs IDE - I suspect (but don't know for sure) that the kind of SCSI drives we are likely to be able to afford will be of the same mechanical quality as the IDE ones we are likely to be able to afford. Yes there is an issue of saturating a single 100M network - we need to spread the load somehow. I also appreciate that 1GB per student might seem a lot, but I'm sure that before this server ends it's life, it will seem tiny. Cheers -- Phil Driscoll