MusicBrainz’ servers are smoking and generally overloaded these days. Fortunately, we have one more unused server that needs drives and a RAID controller before we can use it. Rich Gibson, a friend of MusicBrainz has even pledged a place for us to stash the server for free!
So, to make that happen I would like to kill two birds with one stone:
- Get you a tax deduction before tax year 2005 comes to a close
- Get more hardware to bring another server online.
This will allow us to bring one new server online. This new server would be used for Picard tagging, calculating indexes for Picard and the upcoming PimpMyTunes command line tagger. Before too long we would also perform all MusicBrainz searches with this machine. This would give much better search results and lighten the load on the main database server.
From now until the end of the year, if we collect $500, I will purchase:
- Two Ultra 320 SCSI 36Gb drives for about $150 each
- One Adaptec Zero Channel RAID controller for about $200
and then boot the server and put it to use as outlined above. If we collect $1000, I will also purchase the following to upgrade zim (the all purpose server) from the current single drive configuration that is too small for our current needs:
- One SATA RAID Controller for about $250
- Two SATA150 200Gb Seagate drives for $150 each
If you feel like MusicBrainz needs more capacity and/or you could use a tax break on this year’s taxes, please make a donation today! If you prefer to send us a check, click the donate link for our address — just make sure that you drop the check in the mail before the year is over!
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MetaBrainz Blog 
of course I’ll donate. even if I can’t get a tax deduction on this because I do not live in the USa. 🙂
From the amounts registered at http://metabrainz.org/finances/donations.html it seems that over $500 in donations (net of paypal costs) have been received since 2005-12-20 so far. I hope that you make it to $1000!
@alex
With a lot of help of your donation at that! Thanks very much!
Would you be interested in donations in kind?
(i.e. I have a WD AD010 SATA 150 Raid controller fresh out of the box that I’ve no use for. send me an email with a shipping address and I’ll happily UPS/Fedex it to you on my dime).
FYI – SATA 400GB drives (either WD or Seagate) have been showing up at most local Costco stores in SoCal for ~225$ lately.