eh, a 32GiB ram 8 core G34 opteron with 4 disks is going to eat around 150 watts; that's a lot of 512MiB VPSs. The shevaplug/disk setup will definitely get

eh, a 32GiB ram 8 core G34 opteron with 4 disks is going to eat around 150 watts; that's a lot of 512MiB VPSs. The shevaplug/disk setup will definitely get you better I/O performance than the VPS (hard drives share... poorly.) but as far as power goes, the VPS, on modern hardware is going to win.