Thank you Joachim, for the fast and extensive answer.

It's a home project, so I will use try raid(4) (RAIDframe disk driver)

The 2-pass encondig I'm using now on my notebook take until a day, so
I prefer to move this task to the new machine.

Regarding 64bit AMD models, can I pick any one from Athlon 64 /
Opteron / Turion 64 and Sempron models, or exist a reasons to prefer
one/some of them?

Thank you,
Jiri