We currently have a raid 5 drive array on our student server for our engineering dept. It has 9 36 gig ibm sca drives.

The problem we are running into is that we got a couple of replacment drives (the old ones died) but they aren't the same exact revisions as the old ibm drives. So that in turn causes our raid array to not work properly and the old 36 scsi drives are dropping out of warranty (they were bought around 2001 or so)

My boss is wondering if at this point we should just be done with the scsi drives and go with SATA drives. They are MUCH cheaper also.

But will good SATA drives be able to handle about 400 studnets and roughly 25 professors accessing it? (NOT all at once of course, but it does get used heavily).

We just don't want the server to end up being so slow and sluggish that it makes it unbearable.

The students and teachers are supposed to keep all their created documents on their shares and work from their shares so it is constaintly being used.

What do you guys think?

Stick with scsi or go SATA?