> at 5TB data, i'd vote that the application is disk I/O bound, and the
> difference in CPU speed at the level of dual opteron vs. dual-core
> opteron is not gonna be noticed.
>
> to maximize disk, try getting a dedicated high-end disk system like
> nstor or netapp file servers hooked up to fiber channel, then use a
> good high-end fiber channel controller like one from LSI.
>
> and go with FreeBSD amd64 port. It is *way* fast, especially the
> FreeBSD 6.0 disk system.
I'm (also) FreeBSD-biased but I'm not shure whether the 5 TB fs will
work so well if tools like fsck are needed. Gvinum could be one option
but I don't have any experience in that area.
regards
Claus