New Server Drive - donation and prize thread (Final total: $13,310!)

[lior_shapira]

Donated as much as I could maybe I'll scrape enough for a membership later this year.

anyway, I hope we reach the goal soon, ENWorld is the home page in my browser and I really dont want that to change

congratulations for the great work!

 

[berdoingg]

My 2 cents

Well $30 actually. I'm not that cheap. Good luck guys. I'm sure you'll do it.

 

[qstor]

I sent in $25 dollars via PayPal. I donated last year for the Community Supporter drive so I figured I'd pony up again

Mike

 

[Red Spire Press]

Prize donation pledged or delivered to date:

5 copies of Dark Legacy Players Guide from Red Spire Press (c/o Yuval Kordov)

*Ahem* That would be the "Dark Legacies Player's Guide." Not to be anal or anything.

 

[buzz]

Okey-doke. US$20 on it's way from me via PayPal.

ENWorld is my home on the Web. I only wish had the funds to donate more. I often dream of winning the lottery and buying you guys some massive server farm and Network Appliance disk array...

I am a SERIOUS dork.

 

[Nightcloak]

I did't even think twice

Here's another $25.00 for the server, plus I purchased membership as a community member.

Thank you for all the hard work that you do!

 

[Psionicist]

What do we want to buy? Frankly, it depends on how much money people donate. Our minimum needed server has an Athlon 64 fx 53 processor, 2 Gig of high speed RAM and two serial ATA high-speed hard drives that we’ll mirror for easy backups and restores. If we get the funds, we’ll instead go with two separate servers instead for even more speed; to do so we'll upgrade our current machine to manage the background software and then use the new powerful server detailed above to handle the databases. That will cost up to $2200 more than the one server solution, though (it involves an increase of $50-100 per month in our co-location fees for extra rack space in addition to upgrading our current machine), and despite the speed boost we may be better off using those donations for hosting.

Hmm. [Insert something friendly here]. Now I've said it.

Some random thoughts:

The Athlon64 FX53 is a desktop processor. It is pretty much an Opteron, which is a server processor, modified for gaming to compete with Intel's Extreme Edition CPU's to claim the title of Fastest Processor Available. It has a price tag of $811.00 (Newegg). You can get two Opterons (the server processor) for less. A much better idea.

And you should never put a SATA-drive in a server! I have, in a computer behind me, a Western Digital Raptor, the 74 GB model, which is the fastest SATA-drive right now. The same computer has one 10K SCSI-drive and a 15K SCSI-drive (a Seagate Cheetah). Here are some server benchmarks with Intel IOMeter:

The Seagate Cheetah (not even the fastest SCSI-drive right now) beats the living crap out of the WD Raptor in web server use, with up to 450 IO-operations per second vs. 200 or so.

So my advice is: Save money on the CPU, and get more RAM and better Hard Drives (SCSI-drives). The net result is probably cheaper, and faster!

 

[dream66_]

I just Paypal'd $25. Good luck

 

[fiddy]

$50 from me through paypal.

Figured it's about time I stop lurking around and do something

 

[Simon Collins]

Just a quick question on the server?

I work in IT myself and was wondering if the two server solution being talked about was a clustered solution? If so, it would be far cheaper to buy a second processor, extra RAM, and some other redundancy features, if speed and reliability are the issue, but I'm sure Adlon knows that already.

If you want, I'd be glad to run any proposed solution past the high-level server techies where I work - free IT consultancy as well as my soon-to-be donation!

Cheers

Simon Collins

Edit: $50 now sent via PayPal.