Paolo.. I'm with ya on the storage.  My computer, too, is my livelihood as I do a big chunk of my schooling online.  And all this fiddling around with hexagon, and 3ds and solidworks, and revit isn't just for fun.  It's too make school easier in the future and as an income later.

It's just going to be fun for a bit.  Right now, if I use a single IBL and do a no-gpu render(have to do it that way due to glitch i've run into network rendering w/machines that have no gpu rendering); the max s/s I've been able to get is about 80k s/s out of each machine(3 desktops and one laptop).  I've not kept an eye on the c/s rate when I've been able to get a real good fast render going and I should have as that's what luxrender benchmarks with.  I know the performance of the cpu i'm getting and it runs about mid-way between the amd phenom x6 1090t and the i7-2600.  the average high benchmark of those two are 716.66 kc/s.  Given that c/s speed, the render I'm running now would be at 547k s/s.  From the looks of the stats on the benchmark page; both of those cpu's were overclocked which added a bit of a boost.  There's no saying what kind of vid card they were using either which would make a difference because I run my bedtime renders as gpu enabled.  The stats are also with lux 0.8 which iirr is slower that 1.0 rc4.

All in all, I seriously looking forward to my first render on the new box.  Combine that with the HP Touchsmart that the wife wants (has an i7-2600 in it) and my current render would be going at about 20 passes per minute.  :-D