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I've decided to use an old PC as a NAS and I need some advice

DietDrThunder

DietDrThunder

Platinum Member
The system:
8K7A rev 1.0 MB
AMD 2400 XP
1 Western Digital 120 GB hard drive
AGP ATI All-In-Wonder 750 video card
1GB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200)
Linksys 10/100 lan card
PCI USB 2.0 card
3 1/2" Floppy drive
Pioneer DVD-RW drive
Current OS: Windows XP Pro SP3

I want to turn this into a NAS using FreeNAS.

I will replace the old Linksys 10/100 lan card with a Rosewill RC-404 Ethernet Card
10/ 100/ 1000Mbps PCI 1 x RJ45.

I'm looking for a good PCI to SATA II card so I can connect my two HITACHI Deskstar
7K1000.D 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drives (got them on
clearance at Office Depot for less than $50 each).

Any suggestions on a PCI to SATA II card that will work with this ancient system and
FreeBSD?
 
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Yes. StarPCI. They're a company that makes quality conversion cards, specifically for servers.

*edit* Sorry. I did not carefully read your whole post. You want to convert PCI to Sata 2 correct? I'm not sure if StarPCI does that, but checking would be a great place to start. I would look at their website. I know they do all types of PCI coversions, but PCI/SATA I'm not as sure.
 
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Hi Cepak,

There are several PCI to SATA cards available and most will work fine with FreeNas, and they need not be expensive.
You might run into other problems though.

That motherboard you have supports only 1GB of RAM. That makes it less desireable to use FreeNas-8 with ZFS. Without ZFS or using FreeNas-7 will be fine though.

Another issue that will affect you is that both your networkcard and the 2 HD's will be using the single PCI-bus. It's 133MB/S of bandwith will be shared by 3 devices.

Maximum speed will still be respectable but do not expect Samba/FTP speeds of 90MB/S. It will be a working NAS and a good way to learn how FreeNas works. Working with this machine before you decide to buy new hardware (MB/CPU/RAM) is a good idea.
 
Just a "Head's Up" if your still planning....mechanical drives such as yours don't require SATA2 specs for full performance in the real world.

Mechanical drives barely make SATA1 (IDE) specs much less SATA2.

Don't be fooled by these SATA3 mechanical drives.......it's ALL marketing BS. 🙂
 
Anything with a chipset by Silicon Image generally works well in *nix OSes.

I'm using a 3114 PCI 4-port SATA1 card with UnRaid server.
 
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