With the sudden reaching of our $6,000 goal, we have
money to go
shopping, and I want to do it right away. Jason will be in San Diego
on Monday to finish the first round of upgrades, and I'd love it if he
had to drive back down there on Friday to install the new big db
machine.
We actually have $7,000 in Paypal which I can transfer to our regular
bank account, where we already have almost $2,500 of my money that I
put in to kick things off. So that's an actual available funds of
$9,500, although of course we should NOT spend it all on the database
machine unless that's the best thing to do.
Here's what I have lined up at
penguincomputing.com for $7,108.00.
Please comment. One thing totally left open here is how to partition
the RAID volume, probably Brion and others can give good advice about
the best way to do that.
One of the toughest decisions is which exact RAM to buy. 1GB pieces
are a lot cheaper, and there are 8 total slots available. So I
thought: buy 4 1GB pieces, and there's plenty of room for growth.
When 2GB pieces drop in price (which I'm sure they will, and quickly),
we have room for 8 gig more or 12 total. Or, if absolutely needed,
we could move these 1GB pieces to other machines in our future network,
and fill this server up to the full 16gig.
It would cost $778 more to have 2x2Gig = 4 versus what I have, which
is 1x4Gig = 4.
For the RAID, I selected 4x36gig in a RAID 5 array, for a logical
drive capacity of 105 gig. I also selected 1 extra hot spare drive,
just for that much more added reliability. There are many other
possibilities for this, and I'm open to recommendations. My
impression is that with RAID 5, more drives means more performance,
but with enough RAM, we shouldn't be hitting the drives that hard
anyway.
[huge clip here]
I think this is a very well balanced machine here, and I think your
analysis of the current RAM situation is correct. I say go for it. :)
--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN