Upgrade or replace?

I have this server (I don’t actually have it; I haven’t seen it since 2006) which has started to be restrictive in what I can do with it. It’s running FreeBSD 9.2 and I’d love to start making more use of jails and ZFS.

The server has 8x 50G Raptor drives, all on a 3Ware 9550SX-8LP, and 8GB of RAM.

The RAM has been giving these types of messages for a few years now:

+MCA: Bank 4, Status 0x94314001c5080813
+MCA: Global Cap 0x0000000000000105, Status 0x0000000000000000
+MCA: Vendor "AuthenticAMD", ID 0xf5a, APIC ID 0
+MCA: CPU 0 COR BUSLG Source RD Memory
+MCA: Address 0x5f23c20

The disk is arranged as RAID-10 with two spares, giving me about 123GB of space on /usr. I have about 40GB spare, which is used as reserve and space for database dumps.

What I would really like to do is convert this server from UFS to ZFS in order to gain all the benefits that comes with that.

The current server is:

CPU: AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 246 (2004.59-MHz K8-class CPU)
  Origin = "AuthenticAMD"  Id = 0xf5a  Family = 0xf  Model = 0x5  Stepping = 10
  Features=0x78bfbff
  AMD Features=0xe0500800
real memory  = 8589934592 (8192 MB)
avail memory = 8123875328 (7747 MB)

Upgrading from UFS from ZFS would be the biggest hurdle. I think the safest approach would be a site visit to make a fresh install, first backing everything off onto an external HDD (or two). I think the 3Ware card can support pass-through mode, but I don’t know if anything special is required for that. The server is in Austin. That means a weekend trip, with the risk of not completing it in time, if something goes wrong, not to mention the downtime.

I could move everything off this server, to another server, then get the ISP staff to do a ZFSROOT install, then put everything back.

But really, I think the easiest thing to to is get a 1U server and start from scratch. What do you think?