1GB certainly is a huge amount, and in terms of cost this could prove a bad business decision, let alone administration nightmare. That aside, this is your call. If you think the students/staff require on average around 1GB storage space, then obviously you are right in saying that a RAID server of some sort is required. I'm not sure that SCSI *is* the best choice, and there are now some excellent hardware based RAID cards that allow the use of IDE drives (Adaptec make a RAID solution for this). SCSI (especially 1TB worth!) would be *very* expensive, and though there are excellent technical reasons for still using SCSI in situations like this, the reasons themselves are becoming less imperative as IDE technology and throughput increases exponentially every year. Software RAID won't cut the chase in your situation, though a short test using it on a Linux server may tell otherwise, but will be expensive in time and resources. A hardware based solution in your case would be better and abstract the hardware/software for more redundancy. RAID 5 is another good choice, and although you'll lose a HDD for the extra security etc., it would be worth it if you are running such a huge storage space. Maybe you should consider a RAID server--though I don't think that the pricing would be in the same region as an Adaptec card and set of drives :-) I think you also mentioned the issue of concurrent connections? 100-150 isn't *that* bad, and I've worked on a school LAN where much more than that logged on at one time and the network didn't really seem to suffer much in the way of lag afterwards. The key is segmentation- and this is where switches come in. Make sure that you haven't placed *all* your machines on one segment and connected via a hub--probably (no- IS) a bad idea, especially because of those concurrent connections. Broadcasts shoot out in examples like this, and all sorts of bottlenecks creep out of the woodwork. If you are using DHCP, this becomes more of an issue- and again, segmenting your LAN with switches will keep traffic down and increase available bandwidth. Of course, as Michael Brown said, you could always make sure that students and staff log on to the LAN as soon as they enter the class...but I've tried that one, and some teachers just don't like that idea ;-) Good luck anyway!! Paul HNC, CCNA