old comp for storage

Bud

i have a old P1 150MHz computer, I was gonna load win 2000 pro and use it for a file and print server. Theres 2 things Im not sure about though. Can it handle 2 80gb hard drives and do you guys think its enough MHz or should i look at a little more?

madmat

No it won't handle the 80gig's as that board's probably only ATA33 capable which would cap it's limit off at 8.4Gb.
The good news is that you can pick up a cheapy ATA100 pci controller card and run them off of it.
I've had to do this a few times for customers computers and it works like a charm, the drives will boot right off the card even if the bios doesn't offer SCSI devices as a boot option in most cases.
Worse comes to worse you can get a smaller drive to run the OS from and use the 80gig drives for storage.

Bud

yea i guess ill do that. do you think the cpu is fast enough to handle win 2000 and serving files or should I look at something a little faster?

madmat

I've seen 2000 running on a 133Mhz P1 with 64mb of ram and it was slow and cantankerous but it ran, if the only duty it's going to have is serving files it should be ok, just don't try doing several things at once or it'll start complaining about it.

Bud

k thanks i think i might try that but ill look for a little faster comp. too that way I wont be pushing it. cause mines 150MHz with 48mb ram

primesuspect

As strictly a fileserver, it'll run fine.

Enverex

You could always run a Linux fileserver, less RAM usage due to no GUI or anything else (you get to specify exactly what runs) and less space used too (pretty much garantee it would do it faster too). That is if you want to bother...

Bud

only catch is i dont know linux and I tried once and it made me very mad