Generic Hardware Question

I’m looking for a “Best Guess” from DB Admin kind of guys.

My company develops – sales and supports two accounting software packages. One uses SQL and the other uses Sybase for their backend.

We lease five servers from a data center to host the DB’s for some of our clients. The servers are single Xeon quad core, 4 gigs of ram and have 15krpm SAS drives.

There are NO complaints about performance from any of the clients.

QUESTION: Do you think the 15k drives are overkill? They cost an additional $50 per month, which is one fifth the total cost of the machines.

Switching to standard SATA 72.k drives as we get new machines could shave some big bucks off the cost of the rentals. Then again – keeping the clients happy is important too.

Thank you in advance for your comments.

I'll use perfmon to get disk i/o info like bytes read/write per socond then check if sata 72k disks can perform same.