[gentoo-user] Rearranging hard drives and data.

[Dale]

Howdy,

A friend donated a older PC to me the other day.  It's a fairly nice rig
despite its age.  Some specs for those interested but may not matter in
the end.  TL;DR, skip to next paragraph.  It's a Dell Inspiron 546.  AMD
9750 quad core CPU running at 2.4GHz.  It currently has 4GBs but
planning to upgrade to 8GBs, its max.  It has a ATI Radeon HD3200 video
card.  ATI is sort of new to me and it isn't very fast I'm sure but may
not matter since it may not be used much.  It has a WD 640GB hard drive,
blue color designation for usage.  That is more than enough space for
the OS.  It also has a Realtek ethernet card.  I did some googling, it
seems this is a Linux compatible system even tho it came with windoze. 
The power supply was replaced a few years ago.  I may buy a new one that
is a little bit larger. It has a 300 watt now, a 400 watt would give
some breathing room for start up power for the extra drives.  I haven't
measured the wattage it pulls now.  May do that later. 

I'm thinking of making a storage system out of it.  I think it is
referred to as a NFS.  It should be plenty fast enough to move data
around.  Only downside, not many spaces for hard drives.  I see only two
spaces for hard drives with one already taken.  There is a open area
that I could add a drive cage, I think.  May can fit two or three hard
drives in that.  There's also a 5 1/4 space too.  Another downside tho,
I'm thinking of going to SAS drives.  If I can afford that, it will be a
more dependable setup.  Of course, that means I have to add card(s) for
the controller(s).  It doesn't have a lot of expansion slots but may be
enough. Mobo is only SATA.

Another option, find another case.  If I recall correctly tho, some
puter makers don't use standard layouts for the mobo screw holes. 
Anyone know if Dell is a standard ATX or some other screw hole pattern? 
I could also have a open system with everything just mounted on the wall
in open air.  Would help a lot with cooling for sure.  It does open it
up for something hitting it directly tho.  I don't really like that idea
but it's a option. 

Of course, another option is to make this a media system and use those
little raspberry type thingys for the NFS.  Or, buy a used NFS off ebay,
kinda pricey last I looked.  Either of those would likely pull less
power.  I'm sure the little raspberry thingy would pull very little
power.  One may need to worry about what the drives pull more than the
raspberry thingy itself.  Heck, even fans can add up. 

I have another question related to LVM.  Let's say a system crashes and
dies.  Or I just move a drive, or drives, with LVM on it to another
system.  Does the system just recognize the drives and knows how to add
them or do I have to do that manually on the new system?  I've googled
in the past but never quite got how that works.  I've read it is doable
but not sure how. 

Would a small raspberry thingy be better in the long run from a light
bill point of view?  Can I use SAS drives with it?  Keep in mind, I plan
it to run 24/7.  My TV is almost always on, if I'm home which is a LOT
since I'm disabled. 

Some of this is me thinking out loud.  Some is trying to look for ideas,
opinions etc.  Of course, I got questions up there as well. 

Link to pics.  I hope it works.  There isn't really a good image hosting
site I can find.  All of them limit something or other.  One pic is a
side view of system, one shows the open space a drive cage may can fit
into, hard to see tho, and another is of the cage itself.  It's the only
cage I have but ebay has them too.

https://freeimage.host/a/dell-546.dBilt

What will I get into next?  May be back in the woods cutting trees again
before to long, health and weather allowing.  Always something but the
puter is a somewhat nice something.  ;-)

Dale

:-)  :-) 


P. S.  They said they replaced it because it was getting slow.  During
my inspection, I noticed the CPU cooler needed cleaning.  It was about
stopped up with dust.  The rest of the system tho is clean.  We all know
how those CPU coolers are dust magnets, video cards too.  It looks like
they would make them so they wouldn't plug up with dust but I guess if
they could, they would have by now.  I blew out the dust with my
portable air tank and it runs much faster than it did the first time I
booted it.  I rescued some pictures off of it for them.  I opened LOo as
a test.  It took a while the first time.  After cleaning, opened up in
just a few seconds.  Much faster.  Sometimes I like getting a dusty
rig.  ROFL