Personally I'd go for Windows Server 2003. It's just so rediculously easy to set up and manage, plus it fast.
One big bonus for me is that you can use remote desktop connection from XP or whatever and connect to session 0 (use /console) meaning it's as if you're on the server console. Thus, you can plug it in, run it headless but still connect to the console.
Addmittly you can do that anyway with Dameware or VNC but Remote Desktop Connection is much faster and more flexible. It's defintely the easiest option.
And I seriously echo what Colin said - the stuff you get with Compaq servers is far too much like hard work and pretty unnecessary for home environments. Just stick in the cd and go.
Regarding disks, I always partition them the same physically as logically so it's easy to spread the load over them as you know C is disk 1 and D is disk 2. Easy.
However, make sure you think about backups. It's such a pain to have to rebuild servers if a disk fails but it's also a pain to have to worry about backup software, etc so you might want to...
1) Create largw partitions on disk 1 and 2 (eg, 100 gig)
2) Create smaller partitions too (eg 60 gig)
3) Buid as usual to the larger partitions
4) Use Ghost or partition magic or whatever to clone the larger partitions to the smaller partitions (or even to a plain NT copy).
5) Do that reasonably regularly.
So, if you Windows disk fails you can simply pull out the disk, stick in a new one, boot off a Ghost or Partition magic cd and clone the install off the other disk. You're back up and running in half an hour, no probs and no lost data.
It's a bit of an odd way of doing it and I'm sure purists would frown but it works.
Personally I'd go for Windows Server 2003. It's just so rediculously easy to set up and manage, plus it fast.
One big bonus for me is that you can use remote desktop connection from XP or whatever and connect to session 0 (use /console) meaning it's as if you're on the server console. Thus, you can plug it in, run it headless but still connect to the console.
Addmittly you can do that anyway with Dameware or VNC but Remote Desktop Connection is much faster and more flexible. It's defintely the easiest option.
And I seriously echo what Colin said - the stuff you get with Compaq servers is far too much like hard work and pretty unnecessary for home environments. Just stick in the cd and go.
Regarding disks, I always partition them the same physically as logically so it's easy to spread the load over them as you know C is disk 1 and D is disk 2. Easy.
However, make sure you think about backups. It's such a pain to have to rebuild servers if a disk fails but it's also a pain to have to worry about backup software, etc so you might want to...
1) Create largw partitions on disk 1 and 2 (eg, 100 gig)
2) Create smaller partitions too (eg 60 gig)
3) Buid as usual to the larger partitions
4) Use Ghost or partition magic or whatever to clone the larger partitions to the smaller partitions (or even to a plain NT copy).
5) Do that reasonably regularly.
So, if you Windows disk fails you can simply pull out the disk, stick in a new one, boot off a Ghost or Partition magic cd and clone the install off the other disk. You're back up and running in half an hour, no probs and no lost data.
It's a bit of an odd way of doing it and I'm sure purists would frown but it works.