[Zope-DB] Optimal System Design

[brianc at temple.edu]

Was wondering if the people on this list could give me their 
view on the optimal way to design a new system I'm 
developing for zope/mysql.

Dell PowerEdge 1600SC Tower Server
Single 2.4 GHz Xeon Processor (possible upgrade to 4)
2x256MB DDR SDRAM (4 slots, up to 4 GB)
2x36GB SCSI 10K RPM, onboard controller.
Integrated Gigabit NIC (Either Broadcom or Intel)

I'm going to install Suse Linux 9.0 because of personal 
preference. (Would 9.1 with the 2.6 Kernel be worth it?)

The server will be running Zope 2.x, MySQL 4.x, Apache 2, 
and a simple ftp server. The mysql table sizes will be 
roughly a gig in size. The performance intensive tables will 
be MyISAM.

What is the optimal harddrive configuration to use? Software 
RAID 0 the 2 disks together and then partition from there? 
(data integrity is not an issue) Or make one a dedicated 
data drive for mysql? And the other for ftp server file 
space. 

What is the best way to partition the file system out? 
Possibly buying a cheap IDE drive to run the OS partitions 
off of wouldn't be out of the question. 

The intended traffic will probably be small at first, 
however, as the datasets grow as well as popularity we could 
foreseeably be adding more hardware. 

This is the first system I'm developing ground up so any 
advice would be greatly appreciated. 

Thanks,
Brian

PS. For anyone interested the price tag on this system is 
$1,097.