This is some great info. I appreciate you guys taking the time to share the info.
I know Harry says they have SATA i/o issues. Any thoughts on striped SATA drives for this situation? I know on my own gaming PC, my striped 7200 2TB drives are performing as well as my SSDs (non raid) when reading or writing, so I would guess that to be about the same server wise. What about raid 10 if I'm actually concerned with stability?
CPU wise, it seems that most of the common Xeons today would work. Do you guys have recommendations on hosts within the Chicago region? Obviously I can Google this stuff until I'm blue in the face, but hearing about current situations on a game I'm interested in running seems much more relevant compared to generalizations on other games.