I know nothing about running this kind of project, and as such I want to be clear that I'm not criticizing anyone about the servers running out of disk space, Im just curious as to how that actually happens. Like, it would make sense if the servers for this project are also being used for the long term storage of the results, but if that is handled by some other organization, wouldn't freeing up server space for the project be as simple as transferring data to whatever server is storing the results long term?

Also, couldn't the total storage capacity of the project servers be increased simply by adding additional hard drives? I know really big, server grade ones are probably expensive, but cant you also use regular consumer grade ones as well? Sure its not ideal, since they were not really meant to handle the same load, and they have lower bandwidth, and if you wanted them cheap you would be getting smaller ones, but how expensive would it be to make an additional RAID array out of cheap, old desktop drives with a capacity of around 250 GB each? The server status page says that there are 2 arrays in use right now, both using RAID 5. One is made from 8 600 GB drives, the other from 3 600 GB drives. If I understand how RAID 5 works, that would give a total storage capacity of 4200 GB, right? Say you get 5 250 GB consumer level drives for cheap, and in RAID 5 that would give you an extra 1000 GB of space. And if you wanted to have greater redundancy in the event of a failure since they are all old, consumer grade drives, just tell it to use 2 drives instead of 1 for redundancy, at the cost of 250 GB of storage space.

If any of that is even remotely viable, (and again, I am by no means an expert on this stuff) would it be better to 'donate' by mailing a couple old hard drives rather than a $20 donation potentially? Again, I don't want to tell anyone how to do their job, or imply that I could do it better, (because I really cant) Im just curious about why things are done the way they are done.

plase i like to know how can we withdraw our credit or how do we trade it to be able to know maybe it worth leaving the computer for please, i am new to the project please i just want to be clear with how to withdraw and hwat is the value of the credit ?