Hi Jared, Looked at the setup you are proposing. I am a little puzzled by your hardware decisions. I find this to be a pretty "big" machine to still use a client version of Windows or even Windows at all. I see you want to use Visual Studio so this is probably the reason why you opted for Windows. If you are flexible on the operating system choice, I would recommend installing Linux instead of Windows. For your disk system, have you considered using a RAID 5 made of maybe 4 or 5 of thos 1 TB 10 KRPM disks? You'll get data protection and increase IOPS. You have to keep in mind that SAS usually requires about 50-75 MB/s of I/O per CPU core to ensure all CPU cores are "busy". As for your other disks, having 2 SSDs (one for OS/Apps and one for work) would be the best. If you don't want to purchase 2 SSDs, I would put the OS and Apps on a HD and SASWORK on the SSD. Yes, your SSD's lifespan will be much shorter but the performance gain you'll observe are definitely worth it. Also, as you seam to understand, SAS does mostly sequential I/O so this help "save" your SSD. Read-Ahead and Write-Behind is useful. But multi-pathing only applies if you are using a SAN which does not seams to be your case. For the procs, I'm not sure what the answer is. I rarely see people using the desktop version of SAS anymore so I can hardly tell, best thing would be to check with your sales rep. I hope this helps a little. Yoan
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