New Server: AMD 4850e with RAID 5

Well: the time finally came for me to bite the bullet and buy a new home server. This new machine is replacing my circa 1999 Dell Pentium III 550mhz box that has been running, faithfully I might add, in my basement for the last couple of years as a NAS.  It will also replace the laptop with the broken screen in the basement, which has been serving as my web server.  Since: my file transfer speeds were so appalling (~10MB/s), I am running out of hard drive space, and the box sounds like it is ready to take off at any moment (I don’t think there are any ball bearings left) I thought it prudent to bit the bullet and get a new server.

Since this will be used mainly to store my files and do web development, I went with something cheap and, as much as possible, power efficient.  Here’s what I ended up with:

• Processor: AMD 4850e  (2.5ghz Dual-Processor, 45Watt)
• Motherboard: ECS A780GM-A AM2+ (780G)
• Memory: 4gb DDR-800
• Hard Drives: 3x Western Digital 1TB “Green Power” (WD10EADS)
• Power Supply: Antec 380 Watts Earth Power Supplies (EA380)

I am still waiting for the new hard drives to arrive (should be here today) — but so far, so good!  Hope to benchmark some power consumption as well as hard drive performance when I have the chance.  And also, get a virtual machine up and running for the web server so I can get rid of the two computers in my basement and just run one.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 12:25 pm and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Tags: amd.