holy terabyte, batman
speaking of platforms, i found a couple deals at one of my favourite online vendors which made me quickly want to drop some cash (as if I had any).
first, a barebones pc with an AMD 2.6GHz dual core x64 chip on a hell of a motherboard with 800/1000 MHz front side bus, dual gigabit LAN, support for up to 4GB of 32-bit memory, 2 PCI Express X16 Slots, 5 SATA II connections, 2 PATA/IDE connections, 4 PCI slots, all sorts of RAID capabilities, a 500 watt power supply, and a killer cooling fan, for $550.
They're also running a sale on 500GB 7200RPM 16MB cache SATA drives for $150 and 1GB PC3200 RAM for $89/stick. And they've got several video cards on special, too, but I have no idea what's good anymore.
Actually, I have no idea if anything here is good. It just sounds so much faster than what I have at work, it made me drool for a little while.