I use solid state drives in some systems. They are very fast in random reading, about equal to SAS drives in sequential reading but slower than SATA in writing. It depends on your application if you will see a speed increase.

Furthermore it is very difficult to compare some figures between server configurations. For example:

• 8GB DDR2 will be slower than 8GB DDR3
  
• 8GB as 2x4GB will be slower than 4x2GB on most memory boards
  
• 8GB unbuffered RAM will be slower than 8GB buffered RAM
  
• 8GB non-ECC memory will be as fast as 8GB ECC memory, but less reliable.

Therefore it makes a huge difference if people offer you 8GB as 2x4GB DDR2, or as 4x2GB fully buffered ECC DDR3 memory.

I am not a fan of AMD processors. I have always had lockups (about once a month) on both CentOS and FreeBSD with the default kernel configurations where I didn't have those problems with Intel processors.

I am currently building a low/medium end server for colocation which will go in production in about one month. Although it is an A-brand, it is one of the cheapest models. Goals are random access memory performance combined with large storage. Fast random access to the storage is not needed. It consists of:

• Intel Xeon X3430 2.4 GHz.
  
• 4 x 2GB DDR3 ECC fully buffered memory at 1333
  
• 4 x 2TB SATA hotswap in 2x RAID 1 configuration

I expect the total costs of this configuration to be somewhere around $2200

a dual xeon, scsi drives, 8gigs of ram.

I'm running quite a few websites on a server with less than this and dont get any performance issues.

Though it did get a performance boost when I first set it up just by disabling background tasks that were never required.

I do recemmend a really decent network card, this will reduce CPU usage and help the server to cope better with attacks.

What AMD processors where you having problems with?

The only AMD which is still active in my network is an AMD Sempron 2400+. It locks up about once every few days with the Centos 5 kernel version 2.6.18-128 and once every two months with kernel version 2.6.18-8. I have now installed the old kernel and that crash rate is sufficient for where I use this machine for.

I don't remember the AMD processor models in the FreeBSD systems I used in the past.

Ouch. Sufficient crash rate for me is 0% thank you very much. I'd not heard of AMD processors crashing under linux.

It may be due to some motherboard specifics, not the processor itself. I have had running FreeBSD 6.3 on AMD boards without problems, but once I upgraded to FreeBSD 7.0 the same crash problem started as I have now with the new pre-compiled Centos kernel.

Because FreeBSD is fully source built it was more difficult to go back to the previous OS version. I also at that point decided to stop further development on FreeBSD and work exclusively on Linux so I just abandoned those machines.

I also have a 0% crash rate with AMD but im also runnning windows server.