Re: [gentoo-user] Rearranging hard drives and data.

[David Haller]

Hello,

On Sat, 19 Dec 2020, Dale wrote:
>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

Meh. I'm running an Athlon II X2 250, 65W TDP, i.e. same CPU family
(0x10/16), running at 3.0 GHz with 4GiB DDR3 RAM ... After (again)
over 10 years, I'd like to upgrade again a bit, Ryzen 5000 4-8core
w/32GiB RAM like ;)

[..]
>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. 

Beware: I use a lot of disks and I tried running it with then 8 (or 9? 
or 10? Lots!) HDDs with a 500W (or even 550W) PSU. System wouldn't
reliably boot up. Replaced with a 650W PSU and it's running since
(which is, those 10+ years now :) Currently I have a SSD and 7 HDDs
(and 2 DVD[1]) ;)

Typical spinning rust drives are (or at least were) specced to take up
to about 30W while spinning up, ~10-12W-ish on access, ~5-7W-ish while
idle. For me, that then was ~240-300W alone for all the drives at
power-on. Too much obviously for the 500W PSU along with all the rest
of the box also starting ;)

I've got a nice Seasonic PSU from Corsair (TX650 v2) (the v1 was some
other stuff), only drawback is that it has gotten a bit clogged up
with dust and gotten loud and there's no easy way to clean it out (at
least without taking it apart) *sigh*...

>I'm thinking of making a storage system out of it.  I think it is
>referred to as a NFS.

Nope. NFS is "Network File System". You mean "NAS" = "Network Attached
Storage" ;)

>It should be plenty fast enough to move data around.  Only downside,
>not many spaces for hard drives.

Also, that Phenom X6 w/ 125W TDP is plenty powerhungry, even at idle
(ISTR 50W-ish, while modern stuff can take only 20-10W for the system,
aside from the HDDs in both cases).

>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? 

No idea, but I'd go for a different case. And probably, depending on
budget vs. power-consumption (cost) for a different CPU+MoBo+RAM,
something like a AMD Ryzen 3 3200G or maybe a x86 Celeron/Pentium/i3...

HTH,
-dnh

[1] too lazy even to unplug the older one

-- 
Actually, NT is more like LSD with all the good effects filtered out.
                                                     -- Andrew Maddox