Thoughts on a potential old PC as file server.

N

nerr

Limp Gawd
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Jun 19, 2008
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My school's going to be doing a big technology upgrade this year, and it's going to be displacing a lot of old Pentium 4 PCs. I'm looking into getting a file server, for use both at home and while I'm away at college. The specs on the boxes are something like this:

Pentium 4 @ 2.4GHz
1GB DDR2 RAM
40GB HDD (IDE I think, but I could always just get a SATA card)
300W PSU.

They're old Dell Optiplex machines. Might one of these work well enough for a 24/7 file server, and would a Pentium 4 pretty much suck as far as power consumption goes for this thing? I'd like to keep power consumption low as possible.
 
P4s were known to be pretty hot and use a lot of energy, though any cobbled together computer with spare parts should do nicely for WHS storage. :)
 
Syntax Error said:
P4s were known to be pretty hot and use a lot of energy, though any cobbled together computer with spare parts should do nicely for WHS storage. :)
Click to expand...

The first part is what I'm afraid of. We have a P4 box here at home, and I hate it with a passion. It's hot, noisy, and I'm sure it sucks down power like nothing. But that being said... I'd take a cheap P4 box over my only other alternatives at this point: building one (don't have the cash), or running it on a half-dead Pentium II box.
 
Perfectly fine specs for a fileserver, too powerful actually.

I'm using FreeNAS on an old AMD K7 500MHz with 384 MB RAM. It handles software RAID 5 just fine.
 
Being that it's a Dell prebuilt, I highly doubt it, but when I get ahold of the thing, I'll see what I can do.
 
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