A general remark about RAM. The reason karlotta and I mention RAM is because in general, spending money on RAM is more effective then spending the same amount on Raid arrays.
To answer Graham's latest post.
Your machine doesn't seem to have ovious weak spots. But it all depends on the applications.
You'll have to do some monitoring on your machine to see if you can spot any bottlenecks. Especially since we don't know that geographic visualisation system. (though I can remember some HUGE photo's that we used for geologic work)
But take videoediting for instance. Lots of people claim that that needs high sequential read/writes. But when I edit DV video, on a prosumer editing board, it only needs 10MB/s maximum and something like 128MB.
Video can easily be edited in streaming mode, so that a smart editing tool will never need to load large amounts of data.
A lot depends on how geovis works. If it loads the entire dataset in memory then you high sequential speed to load the data. (assuming it's just one file) and of course lots of memory once it is loaded and at that point the disk is probably not used at all anymore.
But the programmer of such a program might have created smart ways to reduce the memory footage be loading only parts of the data and then you need less of both.
That is something that you can only determine yourself by monitoring the system while you are using the application.
The question is also if the loading of the dataset is a problem for you. Loading a single 1GB file will take something like 30 sec on a modern disk, and you can reduce that to 15 seconds with a raid0 array. But is that worth the trouble if you then spend an hour working with that file while during that time the harddisk is not used at all?
Then something not related to harddisks.
I would adivce you to look at XP x64 instead of Server2003.
Server2003 will probably not gain you much. It is also limited to the same 2GB because it is limited by the same 32bit cpu.
There is a 3GB switch in Windows Server, (which XP might also have now, but info from MS on that is contradicting) but that will only help you with programs which support that feature. (Very few programs support it) Also the /3GB switch can easily cause problems because you also have a modern videocard with lots of ram. (and you wouldn't want to ditch that one would you?
Or perhaps your application can make use of PAE and AWE options? That is a method to use more than 4GB ram on 32bit cpu's. In that case it would certainly help. But again very few programs support it, so you would have to check that first too.
When you use a x64 version of windows, the OS won't have that memory limitation anymore. But it could well be that your application is still limited to 2GB, if it was developed with that limit in mind.
But at least the OS would then be more efficient in handling the large amount of memory and it is easier to make good use of the rest of it.
