Howdy, A friend donated a older PC to me the other day. It's a fairly nice rig despite its age. Some specs for those interested but may not matter in the end. TL;DR, skip to next paragraph. It's a Dell Inspiron 546. AMD 9750 quad core CPU running at 2.4GHz. It currently has 4GBs but planning to upgrade to 8GBs, its max. It has a ATI Radeon HD3200 video card. ATI is sort of new to me and it isn't very fast I'm sure but may not matter since it may not be used much. It has a WD 640GB hard drive, blue color designation for usage. That is more than enough space for the OS. It also has a Realtek ethernet card. I did some googling, it seems this is a Linux compatible system even tho it came with windoze. The power supply was replaced a few years ago. I may buy a new one that is a little bit larger. It has a 300 watt now, a 400 watt would give some breathing room for start up power for the extra drives. I haven't measured the wattage it pulls now. May do that later.
I'm thinking of making a storage system out of it. I think it is referred to as a NFS. It should be plenty fast enough to move data around. Only downside, not many spaces for hard drives. I see only two spaces for hard drives with one already taken. There is a open area that I could add a drive cage, I think. May can fit two or three hard drives in that. There's also a 5 1/4 space too. Another downside tho, I'm thinking of going to SAS drives. If I can afford that, it will be a more dependable setup. Of course, that means I have to add card(s) for the controller(s). It doesn't have a lot of expansion slots but may be enough. Mobo is only SATA. Another option, find another case. If I recall correctly tho, some puter makers don't use standard layouts for the mobo screw holes. Anyone know if Dell is a standard ATX or some other screw hole pattern? I could also have a open system with everything just mounted on the wall in open air. Would help a lot with cooling for sure. It does open it up for something hitting it directly tho. I don't really like that idea but it's a option. Of course, another option is to make this a media system and use those little raspberry type thingys for the NFS. Or, buy a used NFS off ebay, kinda pricey last I looked. Either of those would likely pull less power. I'm sure the little raspberry thingy would pull very little power. One may need to worry about what the drives pull more than the raspberry thingy itself. Heck, even fans can add up. I have another question related to LVM. Let's say a system crashes and dies. Or I just move a drive, or drives, with LVM on it to another system. Does the system just recognize the drives and knows how to add them or do I have to do that manually on the new system? I've googled in the past but never quite got how that works. I've read it is doable but not sure how. Would a small raspberry thingy be better in the long run from a light bill point of view? Can I use SAS drives with it? Keep in mind, I plan it to run 24/7. My TV is almost always on, if I'm home which is a LOT since I'm disabled. Some of this is me thinking out loud. Some is trying to look for ideas, opinions etc. Of course, I got questions up there as well. Link to pics. I hope it works. There isn't really a good image hosting site I can find. All of them limit something or other. One pic is a side view of system, one shows the open space a drive cage may can fit into, hard to see tho, and another is of the cage itself. It's the only cage I have but ebay has them too. https://freeimage.host/a/dell-546.dBilt What will I get into next? May be back in the woods cutting trees again before to long, health and weather allowing. Always something but the puter is a somewhat nice something. ;-) Dale :-) :-) P. S. They said they replaced it because it was getting slow. During my inspection, I noticed the CPU cooler needed cleaning. It was about stopped up with dust. The rest of the system tho is clean. We all know how those CPU coolers are dust magnets, video cards too. It looks like they would make them so they wouldn't plug up with dust but I guess if they could, they would have by now. I blew out the dust with my portable air tank and it runs much faster than it did the first time I booted it. I rescued some pictures off of it for them. I opened LOo as a test. It took a while the first time. After cleaning, opened up in just a few seconds. Much faster. Sometimes I like getting a dusty rig. ROFL
