Enhancements
OK. I am past the original issue of getting an OS installed. A point was well made that the ATA is not the most advanced option but it was the option that got me past my origibnal hurdle since Windows did not seem to recognize that bios setting as being bootable. SOLVED.
Now the project at hand. and I am now more open minded about ideas since the OS is a reality.
I received a replacement drive for the original which was defective so will be cloning the drive I have OS on now to that drive first. (Will make system image first) Will proceed with suggestions on enhancing system. (today, backup and clone, then install drivers for the newer sata performance.)
New Drive: (well new, used drive) Hitachi UltaStar 780GB 7200 RPM SATA3,
As for suggestions this will NOT be a server in any traditonal sence though it may be considered a one station render farm. It will be used for
graphics rendering. It has a Nvidia 730 card with 380 CUDA cores and 4GB Ram. The MOBO has 32 GB ram.
( I also have an i7 4 core 16GB with same Nvidia 730 GPU that is pretty good. If I get a decent server/client render engine I may run both machines for more speed.
have been under-impressed with luxrender server but may try that again. )
I ran benchmark (novabench) on my primary desktop (AMD quad 16GB Nvidia Overall Score 907)
The new machine all defaults. 959 Nova score ) The AMD graphics outperformed the Xeon machine. 306 to 115 but that card also has DDR5 RAM and 8gb ram v 4gb on Xeon.
I may switch the cards at some point as the GPU performance will be more important on the Xeon render machine than on my desktop. Making that switch also means I can go back to my slim case and power supply to save space.
For the most part disc read write/should not be much concern since the work unit would reside in RAM while being processed (except those projects that exceed 4GB on GPU Ram.) This is one reason I was not all that concerned with a faster disc driver but will be happy to use what ever performance advantage I can have. I can buy Nvidia Tesla GPU cards on eBay for about $35 to add another 3GB ram and another couple hundred CUDA cores but I have some studying to do as I hear people have encountered issues with driver conflicts between a regular graphics cards and the Teslas which lack monitor output (kinda need that).
Suggest away ! 
Did I miss anything? DOH!
