I got the idea from a fellow here last year who had a bunch of home made servers. Now I would like to build one myself.
I have about 8 IDE drives lying around so I guess I am looking for something with 2 IDE connectors on the motherboard (4 drives) and a PCI IDE card with 2 more IDE connectors for 4 more drives. I am guessing a 450W power supply will be enough. This machine is not going to be doing anything exciting except sit in a corner serving files to the rest of my network. Low end on-board video will be good enough.
I am not going to do any RAID stuff so I do not need to support or learn any of that.
Most new motherboards are for SATA and lack the 2nd IDE connector. This is not a show stopper but I would prefer as many IDE connectors as I can get.
Will this need a special motherboard for all of the connections or will any motherboard do? My current machine has a 4 year old ASUS in it but when I hooked up 3 extra HD via the PCI IDE connector, it started misbehaving and would not reboot until I removed some of them. I am not sure if that was a power problem (350W supply) or a MB problem but I just removed the PCI IDE card for now.
I have an existing (from a dead machine) copy of Win2K Professional for the OS. I assume that will be good enough. I am not brave enough to learn Linux at this time. My security needs are few.
At the end of the day, what I really should do is roll several of those 40 and 120G drives into a single 500G drive or two but I wanted to learn the server process anyway.
Over to you good listenership.
I have about 8 IDE drives lying around so I guess I am looking for something with 2 IDE connectors on the motherboard (4 drives) and a PCI IDE card with 2 more IDE connectors for 4 more drives. I am guessing a 450W power supply will be enough. This machine is not going to be doing anything exciting except sit in a corner serving files to the rest of my network. Low end on-board video will be good enough.
I am not going to do any RAID stuff so I do not need to support or learn any of that.
Most new motherboards are for SATA and lack the 2nd IDE connector. This is not a show stopper but I would prefer as many IDE connectors as I can get.
Will this need a special motherboard for all of the connections or will any motherboard do? My current machine has a 4 year old ASUS in it but when I hooked up 3 extra HD via the PCI IDE connector, it started misbehaving and would not reboot until I removed some of them. I am not sure if that was a power problem (350W supply) or a MB problem but I just removed the PCI IDE card for now.
I have an existing (from a dead machine) copy of Win2K Professional for the OS. I assume that will be good enough. I am not brave enough to learn Linux at this time. My security needs are few.
At the end of the day, what I really should do is roll several of those 40 and 120G drives into a single 500G drive or two but I wanted to learn the server process anyway.
Over to you good listenership.
