Well I didn’t study it, but I read the forums and I recall that it was repeatedly mentioned that responsiveness (and no, I don’t know if that means for the entire chunk, if which case it’d be a mix of responsiveness and throughput) will be rewarded but also that low-spec h/w will be okay. Quote of a quote:
The basis that I’m using to conclude these will work is from having consumed almost everything @dirvine has said on interviews, etc. He’s said that the client should run in background on most any computer without much notice. He’s said the client will run on systems with “terribly low” resources. Therefore, I have to assume that it will run well on a dedicated computer with a competent 64 bit processor with a lean OS.
Also another by Fergish
I’ve said before, and David Irvine has agreed, that rigs such as yours will not hurt the network, and if they work economically for you then there’s no downside.
URLs: Best Safe Node hardware and Will there be farming pools on SAFE network? - #5 by happybeing
One thing that’s for certain is that the algorithm will reward fast, stable vaults.
I agree, but you need to realize that MaidSafe, er, the community, will decide what fast & stable means.
For example, it was stated by Project members that reboots and even hours of downtime won’t be punished and you can also see (admittedly, I’m quoting indirectly via @fergish) that crawling-slow home vaults won’t be put out of business either.
Values determine policies, policies determine the algos, the algos decide who gets how much.
In my environment responsiveness and stability standards are different, but that’s because things don’t work the same way as here (i.e. no need to drive decentralization, for-profit enterprise, etc.).
If the aim is to achieve a reasonable degree of decentralization, crappy farmers need to be allowed to survive (and comparatively speaking, you and other from the Monsanto family won’t be rewarded for your superior harvests, so you may as well get some non-GMO inputs for your next harvest) 
Gee, there’s a lot of sneaky bastards on this forum! See this:
I’m sure we are not the only ones. (By the way, that’s why I earlier said I’d decide whether to farm later. Make sure you check that whole page, by the way).
Because there’s so many variables I think it’s going to be very difficult to create a good plan prior to beta.
Over the last summer I spent dozens of comments fighting for a laissez-faire approach to everything, but as I said above if the goal is to fight centralization, things will have to be micro-managed and that will make investment in dedicated professional facilities risky. For example, consider this: do you think that MaidSafe will lock their algo during the beta or tune it every few months (like Google tunes its index)?
Of course they’ll tune it as long as they have to and they’ll have to all the time (once a quarter or once every 6 months?, in the beginning maybe on a weekly or monthly basis).
I’m concerned about that so I’ll start very small but be ready to expand. I think farming at home up to 24-48 TB of capacity should.be doable considering my environment (including network bandwidth and latency).