Pentium D 945 w/ SSD or 2x Xeon Prestonia w/ 15K SCSI?

[CntdwnToExtn]

I am looking at adding a 40gig SSD hard drive -- AS A SECONDARY -- hard drive to serve as a dedicated Virtual Machine drive. Basically a Host OS (Fedora or XP 64-bit) with VMWare Server 2.x installed onto a WD 80 gig S-ATA II HD. I would then move the single vmdk to the SSD drive.
The processor is a Penium D 945 64-bit dual core @ 3.2Ghz with 4gig PC2700 RAM.

I have option though.

I can use the following 2 or 3 servers to replace the 3 Pentium D setups I have:
IBM x235
2x Intel Xeon Prestonia 32-bit @ 2.8Ghz (HT)
4gig PC 2700 ECC
18gig 15K U320 SCSI hard drives - I can fit 6 into a server


Basically it works out to the same cost/time if I was to just buy some SSD's instead of having to reconfigure the IBM's for a faster RAID 10 (set up in RAID 5 right now) and install a new OS + VMWare.

Can I assume though by adding an SSD to the Pentium D 65nm the performance will improve greatly over a 130nm Xeon with old 15K SCSI?

 

[orihS ‪‪‪Shiro]

Yes, if it is a good SSD with high speeds.
AKA OCZ Vertex or something with 240Mb/s+ speeds.

Check HDD and SSD reviews for read/write/burst speeds.
For a server all of the above can be important.
Burst definitely though.
(I've heard the Samsung Spinpoint F3 SATA II 7200RPM HDD's have very impressive burst speeds compared against old 15,000 rpm SCSI drives.)

 

[CntdwnToExtn]

Thanks for the info Shiro.
Ya I was lookin' at either the OCZ's or one of the Intel X25 series HD's.

 

[orihS ‪‪‪Shiro]

bit-tech.net | Review - Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB Review

From what I can tell, I think you'd be best getting an SSD for a server, but that really depends on what your servers are for.
Game hosting servers and any server where constant/fast data transfer is occurring would benefit most from an SSD due to the extremely low Random access time.