a decent 7200rpm hard drive will be fine, it's not a file or website server being made here, and dedicated game servers do not need to load the massive textures etc into memory like a client (player) does. dont waste money buying a second hard disk when you could sink it into a faster cpu, or maybe ram. if you've got spare hard disks to throw in, ok.
Just to reiterate, please stop making comments based on experience playing games. A dedicated server is a completely different task for the computer, for most games it doesnt even go through a GUI - never mind doing all the 3d geometry and pixel shaders - it's all text files and command line.
FWIW, using theoretical example for a very practical consideration: the only reason two 1ghz cpus might be better than (an otherwise identical) one 2ghz is if they essentially get double the bus, which afaik is only really true when having two physical proccessors. Note servers do *not* always strive to use 100% cpu like a client does, they will only use what they need and even win2k is just fine at managing them. A 2ghz proc would be better than two 1ghz procs however, because then each game can occasionally have peak usage above 1ghz - just aslong as both dont peak at the same time. This also allows for flexibility because you can budget for having (lets say each 16 slots plus margin for safety takes up 1ghz) one 32 man OR two 16 man OR 20+12 OR whatever totalling 32 or less, instead of being capped to 16 players per core.
- Obviously, if the game is actually good at utilising more than one core per process, then this doesnt apply. And, OK, the other occasional benefit to dual core is if you have seperate cores per process then it's a bit less likely that one game crapping out will also crap out the other.
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