"Leftovers" Tech

This is the ongoing battle that I fight at my desk/workbench. Quite often, as a result of these battles, I end up with "leftovers". I don't mean that meatloaf in the fridge, or the crumbs in the bottom of the chip bag. 

I mean things like this. I'm old-school, and guys like me who have built a computer with a 120Mb primary hard drive have a hard time throwing them out. As a result of about a year or two of computer work, I've accumulated 5 virtually identical Western Digital Caviar drives. Unfortunately, they are 160Gb each (too small for real storage, too big to throw out), AND IDE interface to boot! None of them have very many hours on them at all, so they are still good.

You might remember that I had 2 Cooler Master Centurion cases in my home setup not too long ago. The main machine was in a newer Centurion 590 and my "Client Rig" was an XP box in an old Centurion 5 case (depicted above). When M$ pulled the plug on XP support this last spring, so did I; thus ending the need for an XP box. Subsequently, I upgraded and rebuilt, moving on to an Ivy Bridge based machine that now lives in a Cosmos II. The Centurion 590 went to my former student who's in college now to replace the dilapidated case we built her computer in, which left the old Centurion 5..... sitting forlornly out in the garage. 

One day, I dragged that poor old case into the office and just sat looking at it. I didn't take long to come to the realization that it has a lot of drive bays (5 5.25", 5 3.5"). Hmmmmm...... Stack of hard drives....... Case with lots of drive bays........ A marriage made in scroungers' heaven! 

Subsequently, it was found that I also own another "leftover"; a Thermaltake TR2-430 power supply. This power supply not only has just about enough ummph to handle all those drives, but 6...... count-em 6...... old style molex connectors for just the IDE style drives that I have! 

Then you throw in a Gigabyte GA-G41M motherboard along with Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 processor, and 4Gb of G.Skill RAM that was already living in that case (from the XP box of course), I'm just about set! This MB has the added benefit of onboard video making 1 less card to buy and consume power.

Another client throw-away from last year held a Promise TX-2, Ultra 133 ATA controller card. This card has dual IDE controllers that will connect 4 drives. In combination with the onboard IDE controller of the G41M, I have the ability to connect 6 drives....... the 5 I already have, plus one more at some future date. Are there other things I can do to this "free" server?

Apparently, Cooler Master made one of those "bay racks" that takes 3, 5.25" drive bays and turns the space into a container for 4, 3.5" hard drives, complete with it's own cooling fan.... all for $23 including shipping! That will allow me to use 3 of the 5 bays up top that would otherwise  not hold anything! Should I buy anything else? Here's a list of possibilities: 

• Another NIC to speed up file transfers
• A hardware RAID card, just because that might be cool to play with
• Firewire/1394 card (if I don't have one somewhere) to give me that interface (I have a couple of Firewire external hard drives)
• A card reader for the 3.5" drive space that I don't have the cover for. A reader would cost about the same as buying the cover ($10-15)

Where does all this leave me? Without doing anything else: a file server with 800Gb of storage. I know that doesn't sound like very much when you can buy little portable HDD that are 1Tb a piece. However, this gives me a full-on server that I can do with what I want, plus a platform from which I can plug in all those misc. drives into. Which leaves me with one question left to answer!

What OS should I use? It would be easy to do Windows 7, but there's a virtual cornucopia of free products out there. These range from the various forms of Linux, to FreeNAS or NAS4Free as well as my old Windows Home Server V1, that's very friendly for using a pool of random drives. What to do? It's a nice problem to have when you don't have financial resources invested in it!