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I have a small handful of 160 / 120Gb drives laying around and thought that I would put them to use. I have an extra machine at home (Old P3 450 - with 128Mb RAM) that was cluttering up my closet and thought that I should marry the 2.
Small problem with this particular machine - no large disk support.
I found NASLite on the internet and decided to give it a try. (http://www.serverelements.com)
They offer 2 different pricepoints for this product - Free and more than Free. Being the cheap bastard that I am - I tried out the free version. The free version requires a linux box to create the floppy used to boot the machine (NASLite+ comes with a Windows Installer that will create the floppy for you - but with the pay version you can also boot off of a CD or USB key).
I put the floppy in the machine with the drives and it went to work. It formatted the drives and after a quick reboot, the drives were accessible to all machine on the subnet without requiring any credentials.
Really slick and easy to use.
A couple of notes - the onboard NIC on this machine allowed me to write at about 1Mbs (this sucks) so I dropped in a PCI 10/100 and that number rose to ~4Mbs (better). I then took advantage of the hotdeal to buy an 8 port Gigabit router for $40 and dropped in a 10/100/1000 NIC and that number is now at about 11Mbs (much better).
Also - Even though the filesystem supports files larger than 3.99Gb - you can't NFS copy files to the machine larger than that. I understand that you can FTP files larger than that (if you buy the not so free version), but I never tried it.
Overall - if you have some larger drives hanging around and want to toss them into an old machine - this is a pretty good piece of software.
Small problem with this particular machine - no large disk support.
I found NASLite on the internet and decided to give it a try. (http://www.serverelements.com)
They offer 2 different pricepoints for this product - Free and more than Free. Being the cheap bastard that I am - I tried out the free version. The free version requires a linux box to create the floppy used to boot the machine (NASLite+ comes with a Windows Installer that will create the floppy for you - but with the pay version you can also boot off of a CD or USB key).
I put the floppy in the machine with the drives and it went to work. It formatted the drives and after a quick reboot, the drives were accessible to all machine on the subnet without requiring any credentials.
Really slick and easy to use.
A couple of notes - the onboard NIC on this machine allowed me to write at about 1Mbs (this sucks) so I dropped in a PCI 10/100 and that number rose to ~4Mbs (better). I then took advantage of the hotdeal to buy an 8 port Gigabit router for $40 and dropped in a 10/100/1000 NIC and that number is now at about 11Mbs (much better).
Also - Even though the filesystem supports files larger than 3.99Gb - you can't NFS copy files to the machine larger than that. I understand that you can FTP files larger than that (if you buy the not so free version), but I never tried it.
Overall - if you have some larger drives hanging around and want to toss them into an old machine - this is a pretty good piece of software.