Large HDDs in old computers. (Network Attached Storage)

[sixteen-bit]

Long story short, my desktop PC is down and needs new parts. I can't afford said parts at this time of year but I'd like to access files on the 10 and 120GB disks from the PC. I've considered buying an external enclosure and putting the disks in there but since my current computer is a laptop with only USB 1.1 I'm looking at an investment of at least ?45 just to access my data. I could fix up my desktop for that sort of money and I don't want this to cost me anything.

I have an old computer available; A Pentium 120MHz, 80MB, 2x1GB... pretty obsolete. Is there any way I could convince it to use my 10 and 120G hard disks and subsequently serve them out over my LAN?
I'd also like to use my CD burner again ("omg Pentium 120 burning CDs, lols...") but that's something for another day.

[Gmc]

Long story short, my desktop PC is down and needs new parts. I can't afford said parts at this time of year but I'd like to access files on the 10 and 120GB disks from the PC. I've considered buying an external enclosure and putting the disks in there but since my current computer is a laptop with only USB 1.1 I'm looking at an investment of at least ?45 just to access my data. I could fix up my desktop for that sort of money and I don't want this to cost me anything.

I have an old computer available; A Pentium 120MHz, 80MB, 2x1GB... pretty obsolete. Is there any way I could convince it to use my 10 and 120G hard disks and subsequently serve them out over my LAN?
I'd also like to use my CD burner again ("omg Pentium 120 burning CDs, lols...") but that's something for another day.

You could get a linux build running on that old system, and probably serve files off your big HD's over a LAN. Ask in the Linux forum, they'll be able to show you what builds are best for old computers and stuff.

[Raijin Z]

10 yes, 120... hell no.

Yes, you could burn CDs with that system.

[bizzle]

If you can find a PCI IDE controller you can do it.

[butters]

But the mobo will have problems with it correct?

[sixteen-bit]

But the mobo will have problems with it correct?

A friend was doing something very similar with a P166 recently; Running Linux, he had something like 80G + 20 + something else online. Up until a few hours ago I was considering doing the same until I realised I can get a used Athlon 800 base unit from a friend for as much as a PCI IDE controller is going to cost me.

I don't need a whole base unit but it's either my mainboard or CPU that's dead and I'm leaning to mainboard..

[bizzle]

But the mobo will have problems with it correct?

A friend was doing something very similar with a P166 recently; Running Linux, he had something like 80G + 20 + something else online. Up until a few hours ago I was considering doing the same until I realised I can get a used Athlon 800 base unit from a friend for as much as a PCI IDE controller is going to cost me.

I don't need a whole base unit but it's either my mainboard or CPU that's dead and I'm leaning to mainboard..

You can't find a used PCI IDE controller cheap on ebay?

[Ex-Cyber]

But the mobo will have problems with it correct?

Drive size limits depend on the BIOS and operating system, mostly (IIRC, the main barriers are at 528MB, 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, 32GB, and 137GB, depending on which particular set of shortcomings your BIOS/OS has). A lot of people will tell you that you absolutely must get an Ultra ATA 133 card to use drives bigger than 137GB, but that's simply not true. It's a good idea (especially because these cards usually come with their own BIOS extensions), but it's not a requirement; in general any ATA controller that is not completely braindead should be able to talk to any ATA device in PIO mode, although DMA support could be broken for various reasons.

[Pyrosurfer]

I run a Pentium 200mhz with win98 as a ftp server. I installed a 120GB hdd in it and it works fine. Using the software included with the hdd usually gets past the bios/mobo/os limits.

[Quzar]

I researched this quite a bit and there is no way to get it to work like a true NAT device(you know, the actual NAT machines) but you can easily put either an older windows or linux and have some sort of filesharing going on. In fact, I did that using nullsoft's WASTE, which is kind of like a p2p but is only client to client so it works well over a small network.

[sixteen-bit]

I researched this quite a bit and there is no way to get it to work like a true NAT device(you know, the actual NAT machines) but you can easily put either an older windows or linux and have some sort of filesharing going on.

Yeah, I originally wanted to get some SAMBA fun going on and serve out the files over LAN. I'm abandoning the idea because it looks like I can get a cheap PC Chips mainboard to fix my main computer.

Yeah, yeah I know PC Chips.. but it's cheap. Like "two bigmacs" cheap.

[bizzle]

Heh, I had a PC Chips motherboard in my old Celeron box. AFAIK PC Chips and ECS are both manufactured at the same plants and they use the same designs. The PC Chips motherboard I had was flashable to an ECS model which had a much more stable BIOS.

[Quzar]

Heh, I had a PC Chips motherboard in my old Celeron box. AFAIK PC Chips and ECS are both manufactured at the same plants and they use the same designs. The PC Chips motherboard I had was flashable to an ECS model which had a much more stable BIOS.

There are three or four other brands that are simply rebranded ECS/PC Chips boards. I think one's name is Alpina or something like that.