Thought I would recycle some old systems in my house, so I dug up an ancient Book PC (Micro ATX?) running Celeron 1GHz with 128MB RAM and decided to do away with the risky hard drive that was generating lots of heat and rebuilt it with a CF card.
I got myself several IDE to CF adapters off eBay and also two unbranded 4GB CF cards. Flash disks are getting quite affordable recently and this is a good way to repurpose an ancient machine without having to spend a bomb on SSDs (and maybe a SATA controller).
Installed CentOS and I’m off for several hours of Yum update. I’ll turn this into a home development box and print server. No X11 (GUI) on this thing. 128MB is no longer enough to do these fancy stuff on modern distros.
One thing though, I’m looking for a more efficient and low profile heat sink/fan combo for Socket 7/370. I can’t find anywhere that sells these stuff now… at least not for a decent price.
P.S. Due to an ordering error I have two four extra IDE (PATA) to CF adapters. If you’d love to have them, please drop me a message and I’ll happily pass them to you. The wife while (true) { nags(); }
Comments
12 responses to “Building a CF Card Disk Home Server”
Hahah that 486 and P pro are my private collection leh 😛 Can always lend them to u complete your collection in picutres hahah… like museum pieces on loan.
Yah I think i threw the AMD Athlon XP away though. When my current AMD 64 3000+ (Overclocked heh) kick the bucket I will have a new museum piece.
Ah i see. Nope I don’t need the CF adapter though, thanks :), got no where to attach to as well haha… my IDEs are all taken up (I am still in dinosaur age).
I was just thinking from my experience with the 1st gen EEE PC is that startup in windoze using SSD is actually significantly faster than norm notebk 54k rpm hdds due to gd random access seek.
i’d just threw away my 486 DX 33 last december.
Btw, how’s the performance of using these CF cards as ‘harddrives’? Does it make OS loading faster compared to modern hdds? Wanted to ask you about windoze but looks like you used some other much leaner OS for that rig…
If its much faster than norm hdd then its gd a good SSD replacement on the cheap for light purpose rigs.
It’s not faster. Actually it’s slower, probably because I’m using cheapskate CF cards 😛
To get decent performance, some tweaking needs to be done to the I/O schedulers in Linux as well. I’ll write a post on that later. I don’t think you can tweak Windows too much. You want the CF adapter? I can give it to you and you can go install Windows. 🙂
Nice collection! haha… I only have all the stuff that you don’t have 😛
A 486 DX33, Pentium Pro 200Mhz (this is one rare monster hehe).
Come to think of it I shouldn’t have thrown away my Athlon XPs together with the mobos…..
Socket 7 is already museum level liao leh…
WAHLAU you THREW them away?! Pass them over leh! Complete the collection. 😛
When did I nagged at your collection???
Erm… k post edited 😛
OMG.. Make your comments don’t require email and don’t need moderation plz.. lolz =P
So irritading.. aha
Cannot lah, a lot of spam. The moderation is auto one. Once I have approved one of your previous comments, new comments will be automagically approved.
OMG! U actually frame them up in your house? so cool! =p
haha.. Right from the 386 to the Pentium 2..
You need a 486 CPU to complete your collection.. ahah
I cannot find a 486! Haha. I have a P4 1.6GHz lying around waiting to join the collection.