Looking for suggestions on multi-server setup

[xred]

I am moving in to a house and will be setting up my SageTV system again after having it mothballed for about 10 months. I will also be upgrading the hardware and switching the clients to the new SageTV HD Media Extender, so I am looking for pointers on the best way to get this thing running right the first time. Here is the configuration I am looking at:

Sage Server #1
AMD FX-60 CPU
2 GB of RAM
2 x 500GB HDD in a RAID 0 Stripe (1TB)
OS: XP Pro SP2
Running SageTV 6.x, ShowAnalyzer, XMLTV Importer.

Sage Server #2
Pentium 4 3GHz
1 GB of RAM
2 x 250GB HDD in RAID 0 Stripe
2 x Twinhan VP-1020a DVB-S Tuners
2 x Hauppauge PVR-150 Tuners
2x OTA HD Tuners (via HDHomeRun)
OS: XP Pro SP2
Running SageTV 6.x as a Network Encoder w/ MyTheatre plugin, MyTheatre 3.38

The basic idea behind this is that all incoming recorded video would go to Server #2 and get dumped to the 500GB HDD Array. Server #1 would read the MPEG-2 recordings off that server, transcode them to MPEG-4, run commercial removal on them (ShowAnalyzer) and store them to the 1TB array for use by the Sage HD clients. My concern's with this setup are:

1) Potential HDD throughput limit on Server 1. I can see there being problems if I am watching content off server 1 while its transcoding to MPEG-4 / Running Commercial removal.

2) Potential CPU & HDD array limitation between Sage & MyTheatre on Server #2 while capturing multiple HD streams. Perfect storm on this server would be recording from HD from OTA and DVB-S simultaneously while server 1 is reading recordings from the array.

Any comments / suggestions are very appreciated.

[stanger89]

I don't see the point of two servers.

[xred]

Originally Posted by stanger89

I don't see the point of two servers.

My personal experience with running mulitple tuner sources, transcoding and commercial removal is that a single box will be brought to its knees under a scenario where there are multiple transactions going on. MyTheatre alone can consume 40% of the 3GHz P4 recording an HD stream.