I am getting ready to order a new file server for a network of 100 users. I was wandering if any of you have setup a file server with a simple RAID 1 mirror, and if so di it perfrom well? I know that I could configure either a RAID 0+1 or a RAID 10; however, that would require more dirves and higher cost. I am not looking for blazing speed perfromance; howerver, I don't want someone waiting 10 minutes to pull a 20-30 MB file from the server either. BTW, I plan on using the new Western Digital Enterprise SATA drives with 16MB cache.

There is very little speed difference between RAID 1 and a single hard drive. You should not see a slow-down.

But bear in mind that Raid 1 is not a substitute for doing a daily backup, whether to tape or perhaps another HD. The RAID will provide resilience against a HD failure, but you still need regular backups against a problem which could corrupt BOTH hard drives.

Consider a routine like daily backups to tape on a weekly cycle, combined with weekly backups on a monthly cycle, monthly backups on an annual cycle.

I do have a backup plan, I am actually using a Exabyte 1.6 terabyte (compressed) backup unit with a 10 tape carousel. I am also in the process of creating a disater recovery plan. I just wanted your thoughts on a Files server with a Enterprise SATA RAID 1 array.

I recommend a RAID5 setup. It's not as good as the nested setups you mentioned but you get performance and fault tolerance.