I initially failed to read the stickies concerning HW choices and am thinking about a small course correction. I have found this SuperMicro machine on Ebay which is a 24 drive enclosure; I would like to have room for future upgrades. My main question is whether or not the back plane is limited to SAS 3G/6G or if back planes are just pathways for the data to travel across and do not play into the bandwidth consideration. Also if I were to go this route would I be better served to get a different Xeon board and maybe some new power supplies or just toss in another Opteron and load it up with RAM?