I have these parts which are attracting zero interest on the MP so I wondered what other use I might put them to? MOBO: Gigabyte GA-H61N-D2V with IO plate and driver disk. CPU: Intel G620 £15 RAM: Corsair XMS 3 8Gb TW3X4G133C9A Cooler: Arctic Freezer 11LP Corsair CX430M OCZ Vertex 2 60gb I also have a variety of HDDs lying unused. I would need a cheap case but apart from that I think I have everything I need. I have one of these which is getting a bit long in the tooth but has served me well and it is simplicity itself to set up. IOCELL NetDISK (351UNE) so a simple replacement might be in order. Any suggestions to be kept as simple as is possible and with, hopefully, full instructions as to what to do age age is rapidly restricting my mental capacity and senior moments abound.
Chuck in a SATA expansion card or a RAID card, put all your HDDs in it and use it as a (file) "server"?
Whereas I understood most of your words there eventual meaning went right over my head. Will need to add the word simplicity to my original post. Cheers.
Had to smile at the last post. As suggested you can use that combo to set yourself up a little storage server if you can be inclined. The board already has 4 SATA connectors and being a PCI bus I wouldnt waste time or money trying to source a SATA controller. So buy yourself a cheap ITX case that supports 4 bays and you are off! You have a few options in terms of which software you can use. 1) Pure Linux distro Pros, you can make the thing as flexible as you want. Cons, its gonna be fiddly to setup and may test your patience. 2)NAS4FREE / Freenas / OpenMediaVault Pros, lots of guides out there on how to get this going. Cons, the freenas project has been heavily focusing on something called ZFS, which your hardware may struggle with. OMV feels a little lacklustre to me. 3) Xpenology I'll write more about this because I love it! Some guys figured out how to get the software on a Synology NAS running on custom hardware. Most of the software is opensource, so no major stress on copyright stuff (at least thats my understanding of it) Essentially you end up with pretty much a fully featured Synology NAS at the fraction of the cost. Which to me is the great bit, as its a doddle to setup client pc's to back up to it AND the UI is amazing. That's something I struggled with doing bare Linux distros. Cons, it will take a little patience and time to setup, but less than going the other routes. Also once its setup dont update it. (Stick with DSM 5.2.x dont upgrade to 6!) I have two of these at home on HP microservers and they work great. Only because I want to go for more storage and consolidate I am looking to purchase an official unit. I could buy some custom hardware and build a new unit, but I just CBA. If you fancy a read check out: http://xpenology.me/ 4) Keep lowering the price on MP and someone will eventually bite 5) See if there is any local recycling places you can donate it to Regards,
Do you repair/test/data recovery from anyone else's machines? I often use old reliable equipment to make test bench machines, rather than sacrificing my own rig to viruses and hardware failures. I ballsed up many times in the past and have learned my lesson to never use it to repair/test someone else's machine.
