I ran these benchmarks on several servers with wildly different results. Here's a short summary with elapsed times - more detailed results are in separate server* files. Server 1: CPU: Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2800 MHz Number of CPUs: 1 Main Memory: 512 MB Synchronous SDRAM PC266 Manufacturer: Dell OptiPlex GX260 OS: FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE Drive: Western Digital WD2500JB 250-Gb Runtime: 11 Sep 2009 17:53:56.628 - 12 Sep 2009 11:10:52.033 Server 2: CPU: Intel Xeon CPU 686-class 2800 MHz Number of CPUs: 2 Main Memory: 3.5 GB RAM Manufacturer: SuperMicro OS: FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE Drive: Western Digital 400-Gb drives in 1.5-Tb RAID-5 Runtime: 11 Sep 2009 20:05:10.805 - 12 Sep 2009 19:25:01.586 I buried this thing completely -- the benchmark had to be killed after 14 out of 40 runs, or none of the production jobs would have run. Server 3: CPU: UltraSPARC-IV+, 32MB cache 1500 MHz Number of CPUs: 2 Main Memory: 8 GB Manufacturer: Sun V890 OS: SunOS 5.10 Drive: Seagate ST314670FSUN146G 146-Gb SCSI Runtime: 11 Sep 2009 20:07:53.990 - 13 Sep 2009 03:12:11.208 This Sun midrange server with SCSI drives got creamed by three Dell workstations running SATA drives. Server 4: CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) 2.0 GHz 686-class CPU Number of CPUs: 1 Main Memory: 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 ECC RAM Manufacturer: IBM x3400 OS: RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 2.6.18 SMP Drive: 8 Western Digital 400-Gb drives in one LVM Runtime: 10 Sep 2009 22:06:50.148 - 11 Sep 2009 03:45:04.355 Server 5: CPU: Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2800 MHz Number of CPUs: 1 Main memory: 512 MB Synchronous SDRAM PC266 Manufacturer: Dell OptiPlex GX260 OS: SunOS 5.10 Drive: Western Digital WD800JB 80-Gb Runtime: 11 Sep 2009 19:58:48.166 - 12 Sep 2009 20:22:34.880 Server 6: CPU: Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2800 MHz Number of CPUs: 1 Main memory: 1024 MB Manufacturer: Dell OptiPlex GX260 OS: FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE Drive: Western Digital WD3200JB 320-Gb Runtime: 11 Sep 2009 20:00:36.577 - 12 Sep 2009 07:35:10.401 Server 7: CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) 2.0 GHz 686-class CPU Number of CPUs: 1 Main Memory: 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 ECC RAM Manufacturer: IBM x3400 OS: RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 2.6.18 SMP Drive: 1 Western Digital 400-Gb drive NOT in LVM Runtime: 20 Sep 2009 21:14:37.553 - 21 Sep 2009 05:26:45.646