We have a small office LAN (10 workstations) We are in the process of replacing our server. For one of our major applications we have to have a Windows Server. My plan is to run SuSE 9.3 x64 on the server, and then run Windows 2003 server as a guest OS using VMWare workstation 5.0. Windows 2003 is a supported guest of VMWare Wks 5.0. SuSE9.3 x64 is not officially supported, but SLES 9 is and I have read of a number of people successful running VMWare 5.0 on SUSE 9.3 x64. We will probably get an nforce4 motherboard. A number of these support SATA II (Sata300) drives. Although the transfer rate for SATA II is double that of SATA I, we don't transfer big files. I suspect that seek times are more important. Most reports indicate that the Western Digital Raptor is the fastest SATA drive, even though it is only SATA I. It has much faster seek times than the SATA II drives available. 80 GB Hitachi SATA II drives are available for $60 at Newegg, while the 74 GB Raptor goes for about $165 Regarding RAID, from what I have read. I would not use the nvidia raid included with the nforce4 boards, but use YAST to set up software raid. My plan is to use RAID 0 (I know that means no redundancy) and then use an additional hard drive for backing up the data files. I have read some old posts on the internet indicating that you can't boot from a RAID drive. i don't know if that is true or not. Or maybe it is wise not to boot from the raid 0 device. Also, should the swap file be put on the raid 0 device. One thought was to have three drives. The first drive would have /boot, swap, and /databackup. The other two drives would be raid 0 and be mounted as /. Does this sound reasonable. I would be interested in any experiences of software raid under SuSE 9.3 x64, especially if it involves the nforce4 chipset. i am currently looking at the following motherboards. ECS KNI Extreme DFI Lanparty UT nf4 MSI Neo4 Platinum Another option is the 3ware raid controller. It seems like overkill for our small shop. i am not inclined to use raid 5. Our current server had raid 5 with a Perc controller and 3 Ultra 160 SCSI drives. When one of the drives failed the controller began beeping like crazy, but everything worked Too bad i didn't know what the beeping meant. By the time I figured out what the beeping meant, a second drive failed and I had to reinstall Windows Small Business Server on the remaining drive. Any thoughts are welcome. Mike -- Michael A. Coan Woodlawn Foundation 524 North Avenue, Suite 203 New Rochelle, NY 10801-3410 Tel 914-632-3778 Fax 914-632-5502