Most geeks get excited when they buy new toys, but most of them are actual toys.. To remedy a performance issue I was having in my lab I needed to upgrade some computers that sit in a closet. One of the boxes is no normal home computer though. It has roughly 20 hard drives attached to it or in it, 48GB of ram, and 2 Xeon procs, a 1KW PSU, and some higher end RAID hardware already in it. Its a beastly lab machine for doing virtualization work.
The issue I ran into is disk IO is a major bottle neck for demos I am doing and products I am working on in beta testing for Microsoft and my work. So I found a killer deal for a 16port SAS/RAID controller with 4GB of cache for a paltry $130! (the guy should have been selling it for ~ $500) Instant solution. Its an Areca 1680xi card that will complement my existing 12 port Areca raid controller nicely.
To augment all this I have 12TB of more disk on its way to reshuffle the existing disk in the server. (trying out the new WD Red Series NAS/RAID disks)
About every year I end up upgrading one thing or another on this box, last year it was memory, this year its disk. Guessing next year will be a high end server GPU card for RemoteFX testing.
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