Data mining setup/hardware?

Any suggestions on how to set up a server -strictly- for data mining?
This means:

- I want queries to run as quickly as possible, and
- I don't care if I lose data if the power goes down.

A solid state disk would obviously speed things up, like the to-disk
sorts that Postgres does when it runs out of RAM, and help the seek
time, etc. This would also be somewhat expensive, of course.

I can buy a custom server and throw lots of RAM in it and so on.
Commodity PC hardware seems to limited to about 4G, or 8G or so for the
AMD64 hardware, so it seems unlikely I can run a pure memory disk.

I'm using FreeBSD , so any FreeBSD related hints are appreciated, but I
can run Linux or whatever if needed for this server.

Thanks,

--
Mike Harding <mvh(at)ix(dot)netcom(dot)com>