Old Tech!

By any measure, an April 2003 manufacture date for a computer, any computer, pretty much defines it as ancient!!! It's a good thing I teach World History in my day job! 

Yet, sitting on my workbench/desk at this very moment is an IBM ThinkPad A31 with that manufacture date. It's not just sitting there; it's booted up and workings it's little P4 heart out doing a few things that I've asked the obsolete Windows XPP to do. Am I going to continue using this machine running Windows XP? Yes and No actually. Yes; I'm going to continue to use this machine (explanations in a minute). No; I'm not going to use Windows XP unless I'm just trying to test out something. And to that end, I'll be keeping the hard drive from it with the OS load intact.... in the hard drive box kinda like those people who have themselves cryogenically frozen. Then, what am I going to do with this computing Centenarian?

This of course! Except in my world, it's a quarter the size, an eighth the weight, and I don't have to buy anything! I'm going to turn it into a portable file server.

"Now, await-a-minute", you say: "so you are trying to do what a little box the size of an external drive can do"!?! I can hear the laughter now..... through the Internet. Actually, the answer is.... kind of..... Yes, I get that these drives like the Corsair Voyager Air can serve files wirelessly in an amazingly small package and do so without even being plugged in. That's cool.... but it's still not a server with a server OS loaded allowing me to have the kind of control that can only happen with an actual operating system. And now that we've established that, that operating system isn't going to be Windows XPP, what am I proposing to do here?

You might have already come to this conclusion already given the hardware. Here are some pluses and minuses associated with using them. FreeNAS can be loaded up on a USB flashdrive, thus freeing up a drive bay for storage. I don't know much about it, so there's that, and I'm going to bet the driver support is going to by a little sketchy when dealing with random devices (more on this later). That should be less of an issue with many of the various distros of Linux, some of which (such as Ubuntu/Zorin) are pretty "mainstream" these days. However, most of these are full-on OS loads requiring an actual disk drive, but more importantly taking one of my precious drive bays. On top of which I don't know a bunch about Linux, although I've loaded up and used both Ubuntu and Mint in the past. 

 

And that takes us to the orphaned Windows Home Server: no I don't even mean the newer "Vail" version which I have running on my Spectre file server right now. I mean the original v.1! Why the heck would I want to do that!?! Well.... I have it, and I have experience with it since I used it with my original Hercules file server. It's driver support will be better since it's based off of the old MS 2003 Server OS. But one of my favorite features of that version was that it had the drive extender function that allowed it to take any random drive you connect to it and aggregate it into it's management scheme. Kinda like Drobo, but in a full OS.

So.... what am I going to do? All of it of course! I'm go to load up FreeNAS on a stick, put WHS on a drive, and probably some version of Linux on another drive. Then I'm going to play with it ALL and see which one I like!

Back to the hardware. What exactly is my point with this exercise other than that I have some A31s sitting around with nothing to do? There is that, of course. The attraction of $0 acquisition cost is pretty nice. But that's not all. Not all old laptops can apply for this "Portable File Server" (PFS) job. It's a bit like that one job at Walmart. There are many senior citizens with time on their hands, but only a few make good Greeters! 

 

The A31 is a special computer.... even by ThinkPad standards. This model is often considered to be the last of the ThinkPad "mobile workstations" until the arrival of the short-lived W70x series. Let's start with what makes it a mobile workstation:

• Availability of very high end (at the time) GPUs along with the then new in mobile computing high res (1600 x 1200) IPS screens, which are still considered to be some of the best ever produced.
• Multiple (2) configurable drive bays dubbed "UltraBay" which could take; optical drives, floppy drives, removable storage such as Zip and LS-120 Superdisk, hard disk drives, battery (in 1), as well as PDA (Palm Pilot) dock and/or "10-Key" number pad.
• Pentium 4m (Mobile) processors in excess of 2ghz.
• Full expansion capabilities including 2 PCMCIA slots and a docking port. This translates to either a port replicator, or the 2631 Dock that had another UltraBay slot, 2 more Cardbus PCMCIA slots, internal power supply AND full length PCI card slot.

  

"Wow", you say.... what in the heck does all that mean? OK, I'll put you outta your misery. All this expansion give the A31 (and A30, but they are PIII) machines the ability to have up to 3 spinning drives of virtually any combination on board. When you add in the dock, it's a 4th drive. The PCMCIA cardbus slot gives it the ability to overcome one of it's deficiencies, which is that it's chipset is so old, it doesn't even have USB 2.0. Yup, that's right.... USB 1.1! So, one Adaptec USB2.0/Firewire card later, it now has the ability to interact with more external drives at a higher speed. And I just so happen to have a 500Gb drive in a Lacie Firewire external enclosure. The full PCI slot in the dock also give me the ability to put in pretty much anything else I might need as well. 

It's no wonder that NASA chose these machine to go on the Space Shuttle and later the International Space Station.

When you combine this machine, it's various modular capabilities, the ThinkPad 2631 dock, and my wife's old Samsonite rolling case; it quickly become a fully portable, file server ready for use in virtually any location at any time. Not bad for a $0 cost build.

"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!