Quote Originally Posted by mattkosem View Post
I'm working on a <$300 budget rig myself, should have pretty close perf to yours except for seq disk transfers. I went with an Intel Dual S1366 board, 16GB of ram, a 120GB SSD (refurb), and pair of Xeon EC3539s. Shopping mostly on Ebay, but with the SSD, case, and CPU coolers coming from Newegg, I'm at a total of $382 including shipping. I had a spare PSU to use with it, and spare spindle disks, so those costs aren't included. Just waiting for the last parts (the mobo and SSD) to arrive so I can spin it up. Hopefully it'll work out well. Mine is going to be crammed into a pretty small mid tower ATX case once I get the mods done.

--Matt
So have you received your motherboard and SSD yet? I have decided to use 3X seagate cheetah 15k.5 146GB SAS HDD's in RAID 0 of course. Shortly after I received the 73GB version of the drives I was going to use, I was a bit disappointed at the read and write performance, so I went back online and purchased 4 Seagate Cheetah's but one of the sellers dropped one and cancelled my order, so I only have 3 in route now and I guess I will stick with those for now. If I want more, I'll get the fourth later.