I am interested in one of this 3 options and would like some information on which might be better...

Option 1.) Intel Dual Xeon 3,2 Ghz with 4 Gb RAM and 2 x 73 Gb HD SCASI + RAID
Option 2.) Intel Dual Xeon 3,2 Ghz with 4 Gb RAM and 2 x 250 Gb HD SATA + RAID
Option 2.) Intel Xeon 3060 Conroe with 4 Gb RAM and 4 x 250 Gb HD SATA RAID 10

I plan on having around 3 big Invision Forums sites with ca. 30.000 members each + ca. 20 smaller sites. All togheter are about 35 Gb of disk spaces. PHP5, MySQL.

I will also need to run a small mail server as well as the php/mysql systems.

My question really revolves around whether it is better in performace? Or is it better to have another system ( Opteron, Woodcrest) with a better hard drive interface (SAS versus ata 100)... Any comments/suggestions?

Thanks in advace

For my uses running apache + php + mysql on one server, I'd only consider a server with 10K SCSI/SAS drives or better. The 7200 rpm SATA drives would become the bottleneck for me. I might consider the SATA system if I could run 10k raptors instead of the 7.2k drives.

I was on the fence with this one. The RAID 10 implementation on the SATA drives can go a long way towards minimizing that bottleneck.

You have a good point. My head says sata raid but my heart still says scsi/sas since the sata drives performed so poorly for me standalone in comparison. The scsi/sas drives give better seek times, but the throughput from the striped raid 10 probably gives 100-120 MB/s vs. 75 MB/s sustained throughput, plus you likely get additional cache on the raid controller which is many times larger than the cache on any individual drive which has to help noticeably too.