[SamirDarji]

Originally Posted by pkuczaj

But then your Nics hit your cpu quite hard. So it's trade off. The only real way is to go SCSI I think. I'm already running three IP Addresses on the box, and that increase the util quite a bit, and to add the traffic of the database hitting a SMB/shared drive would kill it.

The nics would hit, but a good nic will offload alot of the processing to itself similar to how a SCSI controller does. And don't run the smb connection on any existing nics, but actually have a completely separate gigabit link to the other server just for file transfers. That would allow the same bandwidth to the 3 IPs. I think the amount of cpu power saved by eliminating the IDE would be more than the additional nic would use.

Of course, then there is also the option of splitting the database and web servers onto 2 boxes.