yup the SAS drives are coming along now, as I've already posted elsewhere don't muddle bandwidth with io performance - it takes a lot of sql server io to swamp any bus, but it's very easy to become io bound. The scaling of sql server servers is a difficult one, consider the difference between parallel and serial processing in your database - a quad core ( which isn't very good as it shares cache ) generally has a lower clock speed so you'll probably lose out on raw processer vs parallel - I persoanlly think we've got carried away with cores and we're applying far too many to our workload because we can. I had a discussion about this the other day and suggested we might want to go dual quad to reduce license costs - after all we're actually considering an 8 way box here ( in last years terms ish ), however we'll go quad x quad - I'd prefer 4 x dual to get fater clock speed. Not going to go the amd intel argument - just consider that x64 is based on amd technology not intel. There are some interesting things about hypervisor for w2008 too which favour amd.