A single, 250GB HD seems a bit "lite" for a server, even for one that does mostly processing. I've found that 250GB is way overkill for a machine that does mos

A single, 250GB HD seems a bit "lite" for a server, even for one that does mostly processing. I've found that 250GB is way overkill for a machine that does mostly processing. Consider web servers, which need a copy of the code (which hopefully isn't over a gig), and the operating system install for a server should fit in under 10GB. The bulk of the data they'll be processing will be in remote services like databases. If you have a decent logging infrastructure setup, where you regularly ship all logs off the machine, you need enough storage space for the logs for the rotation period -- if you ship them off immediately (say with scribe), you need enough local storage for the period your aggregator is unavailable (which can be minimized by having even scribe log aggregation load balanced). If these machines are in clusters and you can survive with some of them being out, you don't even need RAID on them. It's kind of unfortunate that the smallest drive you can buy leaves it 80%+ empty, because I have a feeling that drives that were smaller and not optimized for speed and capacity, but still use modern technology, might be more reliable. We've taken to putting smallish SSDs in our load balancers and other machines that don't need a lot of local storage, since having fewer moving parts (now the only moving parts are the fans) is a power-usage and reliability win.