ppmoore;229513 Wrote: 
> But my intention is to install SuSE Linux or freeNAS on an old 800 MHz
> machine I have, and run SlimServer on that. However, I'll have to
> upgrade the hard disk, since the original is only 20 GB.
Personally I recommend Ubuntu Linux.  FreeNAS also looks like a good
option.

> Has anyone any advice as to which brand of hard disk works best? I'm
> thinking that I'd like to be able to spin down the hard disk when not
> in use, do all modern hard disks support that? Can Linux support it?
> What hard disk controller should I use? I think the original hard disk
> is IDE, should I buy a new SATA controller. (I don't know much about
> hard disk hardware!)
Seagate, that's it.  I don't recommend any other brand of disks right
now.

All modern disks support spindown.  On Ubuntu you can install the 
"laptop-mode" and "laptop-mode-tools" packages that will help with
spindown setup.  Linux has a lot of misc things that access the disk,
it takes a bit of tweaking to get the disk to not constantly spin up
and down.

Most of the time I recommend not using spin down, it's just causes more
wear on desktop disks.

> As well as using the old box to host my music files, I would also like
> to use it to back up all family's PC. I suppose that this shouldn't be
> a problem?
The best program I've found for this is backuppc.  The Ubuntu package
is of course "backuppc"

More info Here: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

> How much memory should I install on the box, I think the original PC has
> 256MB installed.
As much as you think is cost effective.  512 would be a minimum I would
bring it up to.. but it's not worth spending lots of money to max it
out.

If you can give me more info about the PC, I could suggest some more
details.


-- 
SuperQ
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