There are more than a few things that AMD besides gaming and over clocking (Intel strong points) that make an AMD a good choice. I don't want to start holy war here but there is not much real gap here 10-5% in my tests at best. The price * power use thing shows AMD is a good choice in many places. Price alone makes me deploy more than a few AMD clusters. Don't just look at the max value on the "speedometer" to see how good a car is, we mostly drive at the speed limit. Take from it what you will.

Better yet, have an old leatherman belt case or cell phone holder? Have a spring loaded cord for keys that you hate to use when it jingles? Combine, recycle and triumph. It seems that the key ball fits in the case on your belt. The retractable cord keeps em on you and handy. No jingles. Add a bit of something fluffy to the case to take up any space left (if your key ball is small) and you can even pass the absolute silence test. IE "The Dune (tm) don't jingle your keys like poorly tied water tokens test" for you in the know. On the other hand, as he parent said, use less or flat keys. I personally go the Dune route as I am cool that way.

Don't get me wrong, I love centralized backups and backup server/client software (bacula for example). However I use old school methods for a bare metal restore. For simple things blanking the free space and then make a "dd" image is all you need. However you do it, keep it simple, and there may be no need to do bare metal on the whole of a file servers data set. Once I get the core of it back up I can use my favorite software to get the system up-to-the-last-snapshot current.

LVM and Raid can be a little complex if you boot off it so ill give some tips. A nice small boot like SLAX (may favorite) or Knoppix is needed to start any bare metal restore. Pick something that supports the hardware and had LVM and or Raid. Either make a custom disk to add your backup data to the volume or have a 2nd DVD drive. Boot and restore.

I make my backups via simple methods like rsync and tar. I use a few simple scrips to do it all. So simple that it is easy to restore by hand if need be. This makes the restore safer as it can be done a host of ways. Not to mention these unix tools are present in all distributions. Probably the biggest reason for the old school way is that on a bare metal restore often hardware may change. New drives etc, basically failure can be a reason to upgrade etc. Many utilities can choke on big hardware changes, new drive sizes and such.

I take detailed system information and note it in the backup as human notes. Then grab your raid & LVM configuration and write a quick script to rebuild these features via the command line. Basically just a list of the actions you take to make a file system and format them the desired files system types manually. These same scripts will also re-apply boot loader and such as well. If the volumes change after a failure I can just issue updated commands (or edit the script) and make a similar layout of the filesystem. Then just open the tar balls via script or by hand and populate the new filesystem with the files you archived. With a bit of practice all of this can be automated by scripts. But if you need to vary the procedure due to hardware changes or as a way to clone a system you can.