Bought a new LSI MegaRaid 6-port SATA adapter last night, now I just need to build a machine around it1.
The only slight downside is that the SATA adapter requires a 64-bit bus, which is going to make the rest of the box slightly more pricey than I’d have liked. Oh well, I guess it’s about time I bit the bullet and made a decent box anyway…
Hell, if I go far enough, I may be able to consolidate the domain controller, SQL 2005 (which would, eventually move into a VM), and the Virtual Server 2005 R2 boxes. If they were able to run on some (probably dual-Xeon) box together, I’d have quite a bit of extra hardware laying around to play with.
This is really the part I hate. Now I’ve got to piece together parts from all across the ‘net, looking for the best performance yet the best deal, while trying to balance the desire to get everything from one retailer.
If you’ve got any particular recommendations on where I should head with this project, feel free to chime in. I’m always open to the opinions of greater nerds who watch hardware performance tests like the true geeks they are…
- Sure, some would say I’m building in the wrong direction, but nerts to them! [back]
You need to build a Dual Core, Dual processor Opteron on an Asus dual core board, start out with like a gig or two of Kingston DDR2 ECC ram
Cost about $800 before hard drives
Addonics has an awesome hot swap hard drive enclosure that fits into 3 5.25″ bays and holds 4 or 5 drives depending on the model.
and Seagate 400gigs are about $139
btw, tell me you didn’t just sink $200-300 into an SATA card….:)
Dual-core is a given. Still on the fence as to which way I’d like to go though. We’ve got Core 2 Duo on the client-end of the spectrum or Opteron and Xeon on the server-side of it.
As for dual-processor, I’m not so sure that’d be advantageous. As someone in #wordpress pointed out, what are the chances I’ll need 2 physical processors, each with 2 cores? Virtually no applications are going to support that many processes, so it’s going to come down to a basic number of applications. Even though I’d like to replace my existing virtual server box with this one, I still don’t think having an extra physical processor is going to be cost effective enough for that.
And no, I only spent $160 on a SATA card…