Joshua Penix wrote:
Neil Schneider wrote:
Thanks for putting this together. As you know I have bought a previous
generation of these servers and though I don't personally like the
phoenix bios, all the pieces of the systems are first class.
Yes, those were beasts weren't they? :) These new generation boards are
all EFI-based now, so the Phoenix crap is gone too.
Total
$2475
Hm, yeah when you look at it like that - twice the cores and twice the
storage for just $500 more, it's pretty good.
I might even consider doubling the memory so that we have plenty for
virtualization, if the consensus is we should. This is less than half
our treasury, and other than a party, what else could we spend the
money on?
BLQ never got his dance, now did he? :) We could do 8GB up front, but it
might behoove us to wait a few months as the price of 2GB modules will
surely drop. If we start out with 2x2GB, that leaves us 4 slots, and we
could eventually upgrade to 8 or 12GB. Seems that starting with a 64-bit
OS will be a wise thing to do.
This looks good to me. I agree with Josh about waiting on the memory. We
need to run the machine for a while to see if it's needed anyway.
The other thing I would do is get a third hard drive to be stored in a
cardboard box somewhere to act as a spare. I realize that software RAID
doesn't require exact drive replacements, but it makes it a lot easier
to just pop out a bad drive and insert the new one. My concern about
this is that the product lifecycle for hard drives is about nine months.
Of course, maybe by the time one fails, we go out and buy two for
replacements and raffle off the old working one.
Although there is discussion about brand-name servers with support
contracts, do we really need that? I'll go out and change a hard drive
for a pizza :)
The other thing Josh didn't mention is that the warranty on Kingston
memory is lifetime [1] and on the Seagate drives is five years. So by
having Josh build the box you get a much better warranty than you do
with any of the brand-name vendors.
Gus
[1] Not sure who's lifetime
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