Merlin, > moving a gigabyte around/sec on the server, attached or no, > is pretty heavy lifting on x86 hardware. Maybe so, but we're doing 2GB/s plus on Sun/Thumper with software RAID and 36 disks and 1GB/s on a HW RAID with 16 disks, all SATA. WRT seek performance, we're doing 2500 seeks per second on the Sun/Thumper on 36 disks. You might do better with 15K RPM disks and great controllers, but I haven't seen it reported yet. BTW - I'm curious about the HP P600 SAS host based RAID controller - it has very good specs, but is the Linux driver solid? - Luke