My current employer has given me the opportunity to design my own GIS workstation. The problem is I have no idea when it comes to hardware! I have been given a datasheet from Fujitzu which includes the latest CELSIUS M720 series workstations but the configuration includes about 30 different processors, and graphics cards, and hard drives.

I will be working a lot with ESRI desktop suite (spatial analyst and 3D analyst) and doing a fair amount of raster processing (DEMs / Visibility analysis etc), but I also use the gdal library, SAGA-GIS, Quantum GIS and others.  Does ArcGIS 10 actually use multiple cores? I know it sounds good to have, but does GIS software really use it?

I have the choice from 4 cores with 8 up to 8 cores with 8 threads - 16 threads?

Is SSD SATA III better than HDD SATA III?
 

The Celcius R920 supports up to 512 gb RAM! yes RAM! but what do I need?


It will probably be the last time a get a new workstation for the next 5 years, so I am curious what others have ordered or feel will be necessary for the coming years. Obviously the cloud isn´t taking over as quick as they say!


thanks for any input,

Rob