I plan to set up a (rather low cost) fileserver that is able saturate a gigabit ethernet link. I have in mind a single Opteron 240 on a Tyan Tomcat S2850 (G2NR) with two disks on the (P)ATA channels. I hope someone likes to share his experience before I order it. I'm not sure if the Tomcat is perfectly suited for my demands, because the two integrated gigabit ethernet NICs are 32bit/33MHz PCI devices and the board has no PCI-X slot. The bandwidth of GbE and PCI are roughly the same. So if I use only one NIC and have no other device on the bus, then that would be sufficient (I hope). So the main question I'm asking is whether the two (P-)ATA channels are accessed via the PCI bus. If this were the case, then the NIC had to share half of the bus with the disks. Looking at the block diagram of the board, it seems that the ATA channels are connected directly to the IO-Hub and not using the PCI-bus - is this true? (A lspci -vv of a Tomcat S2850 would be nice!) Are there any other potential bottlenecks? What file transfer performance can I expect from this board? I'm aware that it isn't that easy to gain maximum throughput with GbE - I was hoping to get top file transfers speeds in the range of 50-80 MB/s, but I'm not sure if this is realistic. How much power does the Tomcat need (equipped with a 240 or 140)? It is important for me that the whole system takes less than 100 Watt idle. Are there compatibility problems or instabilities with Linux? I think that SATA isn't supported yet, but this would be no problem - I could wait for that a year or two. The most important things are the NICs and the PATA channels. Thanks, Thomas.