That's awesome. I was going to ask about hot spares and hot swappables. Hot spares are the way to go. I have a RAID5, which my HP Proliant can only handled. What I wanted was a RAID1 (Mirror) for OS -- like you have -- and a RAID5 for data. RAID1 has better redundancy but slower write times (as it has to write to both drives at the same time), the RAID5 has pretty good redundancy for your data, but the read/write times are faster. And, you mainly back up your data anyway.
Windows Server 2008 -- again right out there. I love Small Business Server 2003, so I will stay with this for now unless they move to 2008 on SBS. I think part of your money is on the switch and cabling as well.
Hot spares are cool because (if you don't know), any hard drive in a RAID5 can fail, and you don't lose any data, because of parity. If two drives fail, you lose all your data. So, as soon as you discover a drive is bad, you just pull it out and slap in a new one, and the RAID will rebuild it over the next 12 hours or so. But, it could happen over the weekend or you may not be aware of it, so another drive could fail, and you would be out of luck. But with a hot spare, the second a drive goes down, the RAID controller immediately recognizes this and starts the rebuild using the spare. When you came in on Monday, you wouldn't even know that happened except for log reports, etc. Then you have plenty of time to swap out the bad for a new one.
My server is relatively inexpensive (OK cheap). It's an ML110 and any "1" model is inexpensvie. Adam went with Dell and probably paid $2500 for his server. I remember when a consultant told him to buy an $11,000 server, I was floored. We talked to one of our online gurus, and we asked him, "When do you need an $11,000 server?" His answer was pure brilliance: "You need an $11,000 server when your $2500 server doesn't work."
Hey, thanks for making the call. Always good to know what setup people have. From what you told me, it sounds like you are good to go for awhile.
Just make sure you DO the backups!
