Paypal donation balance and status.. thanks everyone!

[Matthew Dillon]

I thought it would be fun to give everyone an update on our PayPal donation
balance.  Our donation account currently has $7677, plus another $1600 in
the accompanying bank account.  I've been letting it build up for the last
few years.  We get lots of small donations, typically less than $100 and
often $10's and $20's and such.  It adds up after a while, though, and the
current balance will allow us to purchase some useful things.

I don't want to spend it on incidental expenses (which are actually fairly
significant, the colo rack costs us around $4000/year and the blade server
and opteron box were priced in the low 5 figures.  I'd like to spend the
donations on upgrades rather than incidentals, so people can feel that
their donations are having specific effects.  We have plenty of cpu and
memory resources, but storage is starting to get a bit crufty.

So, we will be spending a chunk of these donations on upgrading the storage
on our systems.  Right now the SSDs and HDDs are in excess of 5 years old.
Considering that we have almost 30 discrete storage drives, only three HDDs
have actually failed in the intervening time (and no SSDs, thhough the
firmware occasionally crashes on one and requires a power cycle... go
figure).  I think its time to upgrade, and I will be using the donation
money to help us do it.

We will be upgrading the SSDs and replacing primary HDD storage for serving
out data, home dirs, repos, and such, with additional 1TB SSDs.  Probably
two per blade (x 12 blades).  That's the expensive bit, considering the
number of SSDs that we will be putting in.   I'll be ripping out all the
existing HDDs, but then throwing in a few 2.5" 4TB HDDs to hold backups and
scratch space for certain projects like our grok.dragonflybsd.org project.

The old SSDs are still in good shape, only the build boxes have significant
wear (and then only down to 85% of life yet, after 5 years), so we will put
those SSDs to good use, probably as secondary swap for each blade and for
other test boxes that aren't in the colo.

I want to thank everyone for their donations!  We are going to put them to
good use!

-Matt
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