at fermi yes i m back there long story we re buying NUMBERu systems like the fiscal year is ending we have NUMBER asa irNUMBERusNUMBER systems not pushing them there are some other similar units available with NUMBER more on order they re NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER tb for NUMBERk although we add a separate ide or scsi system disk because the NUMBERware raid controllers can saturate intel sdsNUMBER motherboard NUMBER NUMBER NUMBERghz pNUMBERs NUMBER gb ram NUMBER NUMBERware NUMBER raid controllers NUMBER NUMBERgb maxtors syskonnect gigabit enet fermi redhat NUMBER NUMBER URL there s some interesting info at URL we ve decided to go with xfs which linus has just merged into the NUMBER NUMBER tree mostly because none of the other journaled fs s can maintain NUMBER gb s rates with a nearly full filesystem mostly gb files with random deletions we use these systems for caching our NUMBER petabyte tape store extNUMBER almost did it but dropped from from NUMBERmb s to NUMBER with random deletions and didn t want to do direct io at all only concern is an occasional system lock up we haven t chased down yet a load avg NUMBER is always a patio of fun oddly even fairly beefy systems like these will breathe hard to keep up with the new stk NUMBERb tape drives which crank along at a steady NUMBERgb s and you oldforktimers will remember doofus my old file server system it would only take NUMBER NUMBER of rackspace now instead of NUMBER racks cheers wayne 