Thanks for the details and the offer of help - much appreciated. I probably won't be bothering you, this was a "would be nice" thing. I picked an AMD CPU partl

Thanks for the details and the offer of help - much appreciated. I probably won't be bothering you, this was a "would be nice" thing. I picked an AMD CPU partly because a sort-of-server box should have ECC RAM [1], which AMD does support 'for free' (and also toss in sufficient graphics in the chipset); it seems that with Intel CPUs one needs to go to very expensive MBs or the Xeon line for that. [1] D.J.Bernstein, for one, explains why: http://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html http://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html , http://cr.yp.to/hardware/build-20090123.html http://cr.yp.to/hardware/build-20090123.html P.S. Unfortunately, D.J.Bernstein refers to RAID-5 as "an easy-to-use automatic backup mechanism" (if a drive dies); he either didn't get the "RAID is not backup" memo, or does not believe it (until the day he accidentally wipes data ;-).