AMD, Intel and RAID controllers

Hello all,

I'm looking for your general thoughts on CPU brand and HP disk controllers for a PostgreSQL server running Linux. The workload is all over the place sometimes OLTP, sometimes huge/long report transactions, sometimes tons of inserts and warehouse so I'm looking for overall good performance but not necessarily tuned to a specific task. I'm basically looking at something in the ProLiant DL380 series which boils down to Intel Xeon 5500 or AMD Opteron 2600. Are there any notable performance concerns regarding Postgres on either of these cpus?

RAM will likely be in the 16GB range. Any comments on bus speeds or other issues related to the RAM?

What is the opinion on HP disk controllers? The standard controller on this server line is the Smart Array P400 (512MB BB cache) although the option is available to go up to P600 or P800. I plan to need about 500GB (8 146GB disks, raid 10). Are the HP controllers worth my time or should I be looking elsewhere?

Finally, I'm thinking 10k RPM SAS drives are appropriate. Does the substantial price increase for 15k RPM drives really show in the overall performance of the storage array?

Thanks for your insights.

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Benjamin Minshall <minshall(at)intellicon(dot)biz>