I've got a dell 530 dually workstation that has been going 24/7 for almost 5 years. I had one of the IDE hard drives fail at a litle short of 3 years. But other than that it has been great. I switched it to SCSI 160's a few months ago. The 160's are second tier now and I got 5 36gig 10k drives $175
Buy a cheap system....Get a cheap system. You will seldom get more than you pay for.