AMD or Intel?

[Francisco Reyes]

Palle Girgensohn writes:

> Presently ~pgsql/data has a 16 GB footprint.

If you can put 4GB or better in your machine you should do well.
Specially since you mentioned you are mostly read with relatively small 
amount of writes.

> The growth is rather slow,  around a percent per week

What controller are you getting?
We have a 3ware SATA controller with RAID6 and it performs pretty well.
Based on what you wrote SATA RAID should be enough for your load and usage 
pattern.

Obviously if you can afford SCSI/SAS performance will likely be even better. 
However make sure you can get management program for the controller. At the 
very least some type of notification if the raid is degraded.