I'm preparing to buy hardware for a small doctor's office (5-10 computers). Is scsi absolutly necessary for the server. I been told by some people to consider a serial ata drive???

They are using is Filemaker 6.0. Can XP home be used to save a few bucks? Thanks for any help.

I'm using an old beige powermac G3 300MHz with FMS 5.5v4 on OS X 10.2.8 I'm using a plain old maxtor ATA 100 drive on a PCI ATA 100 controller from sonnet. Six simulaneous users gives me no problems... I'd test more but I don't have any more computers (or FMP licenses)

Filemaker Server v6 does NOT require "server-class" hardware and most often will run worse on those kinds of machines. It also does not use much in terms of processor or RAM. However you should get the FASTEST harddrive possible, 10,000RPM if you can with a 16MB cache. Filemaker is all about drive access.

The choice of ATA vs Serial ATA vs SCSI is one of preference. In general ATA drives are prone to problems and will wear out faster, they typically have little or no warranty, but are cheap. SCSI drives will run forever and are very durable. They typically will have a 5+ year warranty and will almost never exhibit problems in that time period.

Either way (I have used them all) just get the fastest one you can.

The main difference between XP Professional and home is that professional offers enterprise-level management/administration capabilities via Active Directory. XP home should be fine for a small office workgroup.

Serial ATA offers several benefits over ATA. For a small office setting Serial ATA is probably just as good a solution as SCSI and should be cheaper.

Will

Thanks for all of the comments...very helpful.