The White Dragon, 4-27-2003
(Click for
a larger image)
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AMD Athlon 850 MHz |
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512 MB 100 MHz SDRAM |
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Asus K7M motherboard |
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WD 30 GB 5,400 RPM ATA/66 |
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LinkSys 10/100 Network card |
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Full tower case |
3 case fans |
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ThermalTake Golden Orb heat sink and fan |
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The White Dragon is running 850 MHz and loaded with 1/2 a gig
of RAM, the White Dragon was quite a step up from our Cyrix 200 it succeeded.
The case selected was calling out "I'm a server". Plenty of room to
expand and house all the drives I'd ever need. The only draw back
is the need for very long drive cables for the drives located in the upper
5 1/4" bays. This case is equipped with 3 case fans-- 1 intake and
2 output. The intake actually required a Dremel tool and remove a
section of the frame. But like all true computer users, Dremeling
the case is just part of the job! ;)
Inside the White Dragon
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The White Dragon originally had 2 hard drives: a Western Digital
30 GB and the IBM 45 GB. The 30 GB is a drive I'm not happy about.
Originally I bought this drive to hold a collection of MP3s several engineers
and I had going at work along with large amounts of "stuff" (such as downloads,
backups and experimental junk) we were cluttering the main server with.
But just after being filled-- not more than a few months after being purchased,
the drive failed and I lost everything on it. Although Western Digital
replaced the drive with no questions asked, they do not recover lost data,
and everything on the drive was gone. When the new drive came, it
didn't go back to the engineering server.
The IBM 45 GB was picked out for primary storage.
It was a screamer, ATA-100 at 7,200 RPM. The idea for this drive was
recording music for our studio. Recording required large amounts of
space and a high data rate-- all of which this drive offered.
White Dragon's CPU
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Despite the space offered by both the 30 and 45 GB hard drives,
we were out of space in no time at all. This was initially answered
with an other Western Digital, this time, 60 GBs. I was not looking
for speed with this drive, just space-- the 45 GB would be the answer to
the speed. Even with a wopping 135 GBs of total capacity, we were
eating space very quickly. Soon, we would be looking for something
to up total capacity yet again. The answer was Western Digital's largest
ATA drive at the time: a 100 GB, ATA-100, 7,200 RPM. So named Sumo
because it was huge, the drive almost doubled out capacity. Most of
the data migrated to Sumo shortly after it was installed. Sense then,
our rate of eating space has dropped quite a bit, but Sumo is still at 88%
capacity.
Originally, this system was to be the console, but there was
a growing need to have a dedicated server. One problem was the having
only 5 PCI slots. The White Dragon was hosting 4 hard drives and 3
CD-ROM drives-- requiring a PCI ATA-100 controller. I required a special
data acquisition card for the embedded work I do. That, a Sound Blaster
Live and network card ate all the PCI we had. There was also a growing
need to have a dedicated server. It wasn't that the site was bringing
a large amount of traffic-- it was that the operating system was not stable
to maintain both a web, ftp and e-mail server as well as be a console running
tons of application software at once. The system had to be shutdown
and restart several times a day-- and this just wasn't expectable for a
server.
The White Dragon split into it's sister computer, the
Black Dragon. It gave up the 100 and 45 GB hard drive, and more recently,
gave up the 60 GB drive. Today, the White Dragon runs on the 30 GB
drive with SuSE Linux.
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