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Hi Claudia, There is an option that has not been mentioned yet and has a very obvious advantage: CentOS. I am mentioning this because it is identical in functionality to Red Hat and therefore it will take the least of your time to move to a new system. We like CentOS because it is derived from Red Hat, no surprises, no unexpected bugs. And unlike Red Hat, it is completely free and you don't need to talk to the Red Hat people (which I found to be completely impossible). As far as configuration goes, this is what we do: - Each workstation has a small (100GB or less) drive for the OS. Nothing else. - We have a network-attached disk farm that holds X-ray images on one share, programs on another, and personal data on a third. The advantage is that you need to maintain everything only in one place and it does not matter where you are working - the data and programs are transparently available to all workstations. - We have two storage devices, one primary, one backup. All data get backed up hourly (X-ray images) or daily (user data) or weekly (Programs). We currently have 2TB of space and probably will go to 4TB soon. You do need to make a careful analysis of what your needs are. We determined at the time that network traffic is never a limiting factor. Disk access can be somewhat of a limit, say when you have multiple people processing raw X-ray images at the same time, but that never happens in our group. So in the end we found that our limiting factor was C PU power and this is where we focused our attention to make an efficient system. There are slight advantages to each flavor of Linux, but my personal argument (as care taker) is that it should take as little time as possible to maintain your setup (because maintaining Linux systems is a necessity but not really what we wish to do). It should also be very reliable - it should always work and you want to make a careful plan to deal with disaster recovery - disks fail sooner or later and yes, I have had numerous users who accidentally did 'rm *' when they did not mean to do that... That, of course, works equally well in all Linux flavors. Mark -----Original Message----- From: Claudia Scotti <[log in to unmask]> To: [log in to unmask] Sent: Mon, Aug 24, 2009 7:30 am Subject: [ccp4bb] Linux flavour and hard disks Dear List, I'm planning to migrate soon from Red Hat Linux 7.0 on an HP xw6000 workstation with dual Xeon processor. Please, any suggestion for the best Linux flavour to get the most out of today's crystallographic software? I've seen that both Ubuntu and Fedora are quite common. Also I'm in doubt about the following: will it be safer to use two mirror hard disks (as I'm doing now) or to use one HD for the software and one for the data? And, finally, please, what HD size is today most reasonable (big, but still fast enough)? Thanks a lot, Claudia=0 A Claudia Scotti Dipartimento di Medicina Sperimentale Sezione di Patologia Generale Universita' di Pavia Piazza Botta, 10 27100 Pavia Italia Tel. 0039 0382 986335/8/1 Facs 0039 0382 303673 check out the rest of the Windows Live™. More than mail–Windows Live™ goes way beyond your inbox. More than messages=