> the machine will be dealing with lots of inserts, basically as many as we can
> throw at it
If you mean lots of _transactions_ with few inserts per transaction you should get a RAID controller w/ battery backed write-back
cache. Nothing else will improve your write performance by nearly as much. You could sell the RAM and one of the CPU's to pay for
it ;-)
If you have lots of inserts but all in a few transactions then it's not quite so critical.
M