Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.
I read somewhere (AnandTech?) that the Shuttle AN50R and Gigabyte K8NNXP have working locks; perhaps that means the K8N Pro does as well? Would be pretty sweet, as iirc it's one of the cheapest boards as well.
Yeah, I'd get Opterons, SCSI DVD-burners, and RAID (either SATA or SCSI). I'd see the bottleneck being any of (a) memory bus (ergo Opteron); (b) disk speed (ergo RAID); or (c) Disk/burner bus (ergo SATA/SCSI). No idea which (ones) it'll actually be, so safest bet is to try and eliminate them all.