Refurb Xserve (8-core 3.0GHz Intel Xeon) on the way - HDs and RAM?

Excited to have a refurbished Xserve on the way to serve our company of 30 people. Just looking for some input on the following:
1) I plan to order 3 1TB drives to replace the 1 80GB drive it comes with. Any preferences or considerations out there? My own feeling is that any 7200rpm SATA will do, but there might be a make/type that "talks to" or "plays with" Xserve better.
2) the Xserve I ordered has 2GB of RAM (800MHz DDR2 fully buffered DIMM ECC), which I'm sure is way too modest. In addition, it seems this RAM is crazy expensive, so I'll have to be judicious in my upgrading. How much RAM is enough, given standard uses such as AFP, VPN, and modest web server use...?
Thanks!

1) I plan to order 3 1TB drives to replace the 1 80GB drive it comes with.
Good luck with that.
Did you order blank ADMs for the drives to go in? Oh, wait. Apple don't sell blank ADMs, so that's not an option unless you're going through something like eBay.
Seriously. The XServe has three drive bays. Each drive bay comes with either a hard drive in an Apple Drive Module (that contains the electronics to link the drive interface to the server's drive bus), or a blank tray. Like it's name suggests, the blank tray is blank - no electronics to hook up a drive to.
If you want to add additional drives to the XServe you will need to either buy Apple Drive Modules with the appropriate disks or try to find an after-market reseller who has some. Personally I wouldn't recommend the latter for a mission-critical server.
2) the Xserve I ordered has 2GB of RAM (800MHz DDR2 fully buffered DIMM ECC), which I'm sure is way too modest. In addition, it seems this RAM is crazy expensive, so I'll have to be judicious in my upgrading. How much RAM is enough, given standard uses such as AFP, VPN, and modest web server use...?
I don't know there is such as thing as 'standard uses'
2GB really is the minimum, but it's quite possible that's sufficient. Some of my servers have just 2GB of RAM - although they're just running lightweight stuff such as Open Directory or DNS. Most of my servers have 8GB and some have 16GB but they're either web application servers or database servers, so their needs are different.
At the end of the day it's up to you. I'd fire up the server as is and see how it runs. If you find that you're running low on memory, or have high paging rates then upgrade, but don't worry about it at this point. RAM is easy to upgrade (as long as you can take your server offline for 5 or 10 minutes) and prices generally drop so they'll probably be cheaper in two or three months anyway.

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