I would personally avoid the P4 chip. They are power hogs and will cost you more money in the long run than getting a low-end core 2 duo - which should be faster and not much more money. Make sure you keep power consumption in mind when you pick up a power supply and video card too. The always on computer should be fast but light on power usage.
Also, I would avoid the hardware raid. Raid/z on top of the raw disks will have much better fault tolerance and will allow zfs to fix silent read errors. It will also allow solaris to tell you which specific disk is giving you problems and allow you to replace it where having zfs on top of hardware raid-5 will end up hiding which disk is acting up. I have a similar setup to what you are looking at. I have a sun ultra 20 with an 80GB system drive, 3 - 500GB eSATA externals in a raidz and an external 500 GB usb drive setup as another zfs pool without any redundancy (I'll mirror it in a few months when I get more money). I do fine with 1GB of ram, but 2 would be better. My network is gigabit and the setup that I have serves multiple computers easily streaming video and files. As others have said, I would avoid 32 bit. If you are worried about maturity of the platform, you may want to look at AMD chips instead of Intel. They have been throughly proven out in 64 bit...although Sun will soon be selling Intel chips, so they will be proven out too in short order. Eric This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
