replacement SERVER SATA 150 drives

[hardware_failure]

Im looking to add a little kick to a 2003 exchange sever for cheap before it needs to be completely replaced in a few years.

The system is running on an Intel S875WP1 board. It has SATA/150.

I actually had some old ECC DDR just collecting dust so I bumped it from 1 to 4GB. That did help a bit.

Even after the memory upgrade, the IO load on its current drives (ST3200822AS, 200GB 7200.7) appears to be just insane. Id like to replace them.

There are about 150 users that use this exchange box.

What would people recommend?

Im sure that a handful of 256GB SSD drives would be awesome for speed, but Im looking for something much cheaper with good reliability.

Right now Im eyeing WD1002FAEX's. 5 year warranty is a +. Personally, I love the Samsung F3's, they are super fast and I have yet to have a sammy fail on me... but like they say, unless you install and work on 1000's of HDs, personal exp cant be used to measure reliability.

I dont want to add a SATA 3.0 controller or anything else, I just want a quick, cheap, fast and RELIABLE pair of drives to drop in and re-mirror.

Thanks.

 

[lizardking009]

In a few years? LOL. That's a 7 year old Exchange version. 2010 actually performs a lot better on slow DAS, like SATA. 2003 is really meant for SCSI RAID 10 arrays.

Get a couple WD RE3 series drives. They're fast for SATA and reliable.

 

[hardware_failure]

Went with a bunch of 300GB Velociraptors and holy shit what a difference!