> Does anyone have recommendations for hardware and/or OS to work with around
> 5TB datasets?
Hardware-wise I'd say dual core opterons. One dual-core-opteron
performs better than two single-core at the same speed. Tyan makes
some boards that have four sockets, thereby giving you 8 cpu's (if you
need that many). Sun and HP also makes nice hardware although the Tyan
board is more competetive priced.
OS wise I would choose the FreeBSD amd64 port but partititions larger
than 2 TB needs some special care, using gpt rather than disklabel
etc., tools like fsck may not be able to completely check partitions
larger than 2 TB. Linux or Solaris with either LVM or Veritas FS
sounds like candidates.
> I have been working with datasets no bigger than around 30GB, and that (I'm
> afraid to admit) has been in MSSQL.
Well, our data are just below 30 GB so I can't help you there :-)
regards
Claus