Home LAN server: old PC hardware vs. refurb. server

[Brian McKee]

On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 5:21 PM, M. Milanuk <memilanuk at gmail.com> wrote:
> Recently my little home server (Asus bare-bones kit PC that I bought
> used a year + back, Sempron 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM, 13.7GB HD + two 500GB SATA
> drives, CD/DVD-ROM) took a dump.  It's in the local PC shop, but I fear
> the MB may be done for.  As such... I'm considering options.  One may be
> if the shop has or can get for a reasonable price replacement parts.  If
> not, I may be shopping CraigsList for another old mid-tower PC again.

I would NOT go for a used server.
They were not designed to be quiet or cheap on power - and you would
probably prefer both.

You might get something a little better quality by going with a
'commercial brand name' desktop like a GX series Dell - but you might
not either :-)

Personally I'd go yardsaling and grab something with a big enough case
to hold the drives you want or just ask friends and neighbours for
whatever they don't want. Plan on buying a PCI SATA card.  With that
and linux software RAID the rest of the hardware is pretty easily
replaced. I've had an old white box Celeron 900Mhz for several years
now (it replaced a Cyrix 686 unit. :-)  Darned near anything will work
for what you want.

If you care about power and quiet - go look at a Toredo plug or
something similar and some external drive cases - cheap on power,
really small and quiet.

Brian
-- 
Hey, it's your computer.... isn't it?