Hello, On Sat, 19 Dec 2020, Dale wrote: >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
Meh. I'm running an Athlon II X2 250, 65W TDP, i.e. same CPU family (0x10/16), running at 3.0 GHz with 4GiB DDR3 RAM ... After (again) over 10 years, I'd like to upgrade again a bit, Ryzen 5000 4-8core w/32GiB RAM like ;) [..] >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. Beware: I use a lot of disks and I tried running it with then 8 (or 9? or 10? Lots!) HDDs with a 500W (or even 550W) PSU. System wouldn't reliably boot up. Replaced with a 650W PSU and it's running since (which is, those 10+ years now :) Currently I have a SSD and 7 HDDs (and 2 DVD[1]) ;) Typical spinning rust drives are (or at least were) specced to take up to about 30W while spinning up, ~10-12W-ish on access, ~5-7W-ish while idle. For me, that then was ~240-300W alone for all the drives at power-on. Too much obviously for the 500W PSU along with all the rest of the box also starting ;) I've got a nice Seasonic PSU from Corsair (TX650 v2) (the v1 was some other stuff), only drawback is that it has gotten a bit clogged up with dust and gotten loud and there's no easy way to clean it out (at least without taking it apart) *sigh*... >I'm thinking of making a storage system out of it. I think it is >referred to as a NFS. Nope. NFS is "Network File System". You mean "NAS" = "Network Attached Storage" ;) >It should be plenty fast enough to move data around. Only downside, >not many spaces for hard drives. Also, that Phenom X6 w/ 125W TDP is plenty powerhungry, even at idle (ISTR 50W-ish, while modern stuff can take only 20-10W for the system, aside from the HDDs in both cases). >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? No idea, but I'd go for a different case. And probably, depending on budget vs. power-consumption (cost) for a different CPU+MoBo+RAM, something like a AMD Ryzen 3 3200G or maybe a x86 Celeron/Pentium/i3... HTH, -dnh [1] too lazy even to unplug the older one -- Actually, NT is more like LSD with all the good effects filtered out. -- Andrew Maddox