dominique120

I have an old Pentium 2 system that I would like to use for a file server for my PC and laptop. Will the Pentium 2 be enough
Rig specs
Pentium 2 @ 319 MHz OCed
191 MB of DDR1
Nvidia Riva 128 4MB of VRAM
Hard rive: Not yet selected

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GigaByte

With a decent HDD and a bit more RAM it should be fine.

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dominique120

How much RAM would be a good amount?
Is this a good card to connect the HDDs

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Zzyzx

256 would be good, 512 or more ideal. You should be more than fine, though, so long as it's just a file server.

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dragosmp

It should be a good way to store files. There is one thing you can't do with this server, opening files while they are on the server. You'll have to copy anything you want to see on your rig in order to access the files.
You should also protect it somehow, because if it's on a network and the network has internet access, it may be at risk and certainly doesn't have the speed to run at least an antivirus.
Off topic maybe, but with 60$ you can get an Atom 230 and 512MB DDR2 which would eliminate the need of an add-on card and would be a proper computer to run anything a file server might be required to do (while consuming less).

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keith27

Few suggestions...

Since it's fairly obvious you have a Socket 370 that supports DDR. I suggest you find a P3 1.0Ghz or faster. You need more RAM. Less than 256MB isn't going to do jack. Get at least 512MB to 1Gb in there. Video card doesn't matter. It could have 4000000MB of RAM. It isn't going to help the cause. Since it's more than likely an IDE drive. Get a faster 7200RPM+ with 16MB+ Cache. That will help pep things up a bit.

Best of luck.

dominique120

I was thinking on getting this:http://www.compusa.com/applications/...402&CatId=1455 and putting a 160 to 320 SATA HDD

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Coma

Install some flavor of Linux, then install Samba for Windows networking-based folder sharing. Nothing else matters [enough to warrant buying something].

You can even run a torrent client like rtorrent on it, which can automatically load torrents from a certain folder. Very powerful, and it's capable of working purely in CLI so you don't need a GUI (but you shouldn't need to ever touch that if you configure it right the first time - and the config is like 3 lines).

I don't think you need more RAM or a better CPU. A drive matters I suppose, but how fast are you really gonna transfer? It can probably do at least 10MB/s. I have an old 1GHz Celeron server and it runs a torrent client just fine, often doing 100Mbps up & down simultaneously.

Just get a bigger drive. IDE is fine if you have the newest version of it - it does 133 MB/s, aka 1064Mbps. Not enough? The interface isn't going to be the bottleneck here, it's going to be the drive itself. Even the original IDE did 16MB/s - 128Mbps.

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Manyak

The only thing you should be aware of are the bottlenecks you're going to get.

The first bottleneck will be the PCI bus. If you install a PCI SATA controller for hard drives and a PCI gigabit card, the maximum possible network transfer speed you can get is about 65MB/s because the two will have to share the PCI bandwidth.

The second bottleneck will be the CPU. Standard gigabit NICs (as in, ones that don't have their own TCP Offload Engine, or TOE) require about 1GHz of the P2 or P3 architecture for actual 1000Mbps transfers. So you shouldn't expect more than around 320Mbps, which comes out to about 40MB/s. And that's excluding any other processing that'll be going on, like with hard drive access.

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dominique120

Thanks for the help

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