ThinkPad Triumph!

They say: "Every Dog Has His Day"! I say: every computer problem has a solution.... almost anyway. You guys know that last week was a disaster in all manner of ways. I figured that over the course of the week, things would resolve themselves like they always do:

• On my day off with the sick daughter; I finished repairing the fence by building a new gate.
• Then I resolved my problematic R60 ThinkPad issue.
• I got a cool offer from Lenovo for half-off of a new device.... which I took advantage of!
• Got another of the R60s up and running with a different OS.

I gotta tell ya; I LOVE Windows 7! When given enough RAM and a halfway decent set of hardware, it'll run with the best of 'em. Essentially, it's like a modern Windows XP! That's a high compliment indeed if I do say so myself. When I moved the hardware from the R60 that was freezing up to another one of those machines; it was like magic! All I did was to take the T7200 cpu, the 4Gb of RAM and Intel 40Gb SSD out of the one machine and put it in another one and "BAM" (like Emeril Lagasse would say), it just worked. I took it to show my Principal how fast those machines could be made to work and he was suitably impressed. Now it's in the hands of one of my computer club student/minions for long-term stabilty testing. 

I was so excited that the very next evening, I loaded up the previously freezing-up R60 with Zorin OS 9 and showed that to my Principal as the "proof-of-concept" for what I wanted to do with the rest of the 26 R60s (and possibly 100+ X200s) sitting on selves in a closet! I gotta say, I'm pretty impressed with how simple Zorin was to work on coming from Windows. Now for the ultimate test! I'm going to try and put it in the hands of one of my least hardware savy computer club minions for daily trials. Stay tuned!

While all this was going on, I went on a shopping binge.... the Frugal Propellerhead way! You guys know that for the last several months, I've been busy helping a number of people buy computers. You might, or might not have figured out that I mostly make little, if anything on these gigs. It's kind of like playing in a weekend band. However, besides the occasional old computer they throw out, there is a little bit of a silver lining. The majority of these purchases come on eBay, and for the last couple of years, they've had this little incentive program called "eBay Bucks" which returns a tiny percent back to you from the purchases four times a year. A bit like what credit card companies do with their loyalty points. Over the last quarter, I've had a lot of these purchases ranging from the Dell Precision workstation laptop for a former student going to college to the ThinkPad X1 for a co-worker. All this ended up netting me a whopping $57 in eBay Bucks for the quarter that ended on September 30th! Don't scoff: in the Frugal Propellerhead world, $57 and some cents is no laughing matter! Basically, it allows me to rationalize buying things that don't really have a real purpose. 

I know what you're thinking: Really; what in the heck is this weird stuff!?! OK. From top to bottom, it goes as follows. A Cooler Master 4-in-3 drive cage. It's purpose is to go into my old Cooler Master Centurion 5 case that I'm turning into a file server. Although it was actually designed for this case, it can be used in any computer tower that has 3, 5.25" external bays and turn it into a, fan-cooled drive cage that can hold 4, 3.5" hard drives. The second device is a portable USB 3.0 Hub/Card Reader that in one device will allow my ThinkPad X1's single 3.0 port to do multiple things. And the last is a rather difficult to find, power supply for one of my Lacie "Porsche" external Firewire hard drive enclosures. That will not allow me to use the other of them "daisy-chained" together as external storage for the "Old ThinkPad Server" project that I'm building out of an A31. It's just $60 worth of stuff; why not just buy it and have done with it? It's all part of my philosophy and the purpose of this blog to start with. Finding ways to do things as cheaply as possible and if possible using old repurposed technology.

"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!