I've started a blog for this project. Check here for the latest. Below is just a summary that I update from time to time.

• A Tyan S2469UGN motherboard. It's a little old at this point, but I got it used for a decent price.
• Two AMD Athlon MP 2000 CPUs. Again, older & not top-of-the-line, but fine for my purposes.
• The motherboard came with 512 MB of ECC memory. I may replace this for performance reasons with non-ECC RAM at some point. Or not.
• A full-tower case (6 external & 5 internal drive bays)

I've been experimenting with this setup for a while now. I really liked the SCSI bus(es), and I had a motley collection of SCSI drives that I strung together as a RAID for a while. Good experience, but SCSI drives are just too expensive for me & this project.

My second thought was to get a PATA card & using "normal" (i.e. cheap) drives instead. The longer I wait though, the more I'm thinking that if I have to buy a new controller card then SATA is a better way to go. If I get a 4-port card that supports hot-swap, and one of those 4-drive/3-bay racks then that should be plenty. (This week ).

I'm getting close to ripping out the experimental drives & stuff and building a "final/production" configuration.