Finally, you don't need a super-grunty server, just as many disks as you can afford!

Amen to that. This would be why most big iron systems only ship with a very small number of surprisingly lowly clocked CPUs. I heard of one system managing a 0.5TB *active* database (ie, not just a warehouse) with only 3 processors clocked at 150Mhz.

Of course, you would end up with a lot of system time without a decent IO controller. So, best to stick with the tried and tested solutions - which means high-end SCSI or FC-AL.

And whatever you do, don't use any RAID level other than raid 1, or maybe 1+0.

$h=$ENV{HOME};my@q=split/\n\n/,`cat $h/.quotes`;$s="$h/."
."signature";$t=`cat $s`;print$t,"\n",$q[rand($#q)],"\n";
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