I agree - you can get a very good one from www.acmemicro.com or
www.rackable.com with 8x 400GB SATA disks and the new 3Ware 9550SX SATA
RAID controller for about $6K with two Opteron 272 CPUs and 8GB of RAM
on a Tyan 2882 motherboard. We get about 400MB/s sustained disk read
performance on these (with tuning) on Linux using the xfs filesystem,
which is one of the most critical factors for large databases.
Note that you want to have your DBMS use all of the CPU and disk channel
bandwidth you have on each query, which takes a parallel database like
Bizgres MPP to achieve.
Regards,
