hi, i have an old 66 mhz 486 computer with 20 megs of ram and i want to put a 120- 200 gig drive in there and use it to store mp3's and other misc files to share between me and my roommate. i was also thinking of using it as a printserver. is this machine too slow? it's not gonna play the files, just spit them out. also, ill need an ethernet card and it's got no pci slots. did the make 10/100 isa ethernet cards? did they make isa ethernet cards period? i didn't start networking untill after i got an i686 system. and im gonna put gentoo on it not for any speed increase, but it's easier to install stuff using emerge. any tips are appreciated.

Goatdemon,
****************************************************
** DISCLAIMER - I've done this on a 166MHz with 32MB RAM
** I really can't say that this will work for you, I did have an
** extra 12 MB RAM and 100MHz to work with. Plus, when
** 1 person would access a song it ran flawlessly, but when
** 2 people accessed it performance went right out the window
**************************************************
As far as speed... You won't be setting any network speed records any time soon. 3com and other vendors did make 10/100 802.3 cards.

Distribution is important. I suggest using Slackware with the low memory kernel.

There are other issues to think about...

You won't be able to really take advantage of the features a 120 - 200 gig drive has to offer.

What OS are the other systems running? If it is all Linux, it just might work. If MS OS's, then I doubt it... Samba requires extra resources and your system won't beable to sustain the two smb connections at once with any real performance.

Oh, if I am wrong, and you get this to work, please let me know, in detail, if possible... It'll just make my day...

ok, thanks. the other os will be win2k probably. ill get the drive, set it all up and if it's too slow ill add some more ram and maybe upgrade the processor. i'd like to use my existing parts though. is gentoo no good? i know it'll take a month to install but i dont care. i can put slack on it though. and what of this "not being to take advantage of the feature a 120-200 gig drive has to offer"? please explain. reguardless, i'm gettin the harddrive anyway so if the fserver doesnt work ill stick it in my main system.

I only mentioned slack because that distribution is what I did my file server to work in.

Features...
On the 486 the IDE controller supported ATA 33 at best running in pio mode, the new drive is probably ATA 100 or 133 and would perform better in DMA.

Also, I believe it ran in 8 bit top end, where most drives today run at 32 bit.

If I recall correctly, it also could only run 1 to 4 channel transmitions, where the new drives can support 32 channels.

Make sure the bios on the board can support that large of disk. You may find out that it just craps out on you. If that happens, you could try to flash the bios for that board, but good luck finding one.

If you get the 8 MB cache on the hard drive, it won't really improve performance. In this situation the system will most likely be the bottle neck, not the hard drive... The cache on the hard drive is over a ¨÷ the total memory of the system.

My opinion, and it is only my opinion, if I were you, I'd back up my files on the other system, then put the 120-200 gig in the newer system, the one that can take advantage of the performance boost, and put the 2 20 gigs in the MP3 server... RAID 0 them and put them on different controllers, this will get your two drives working as one and it may increase performance enough to do the deed you want it to do

Sorry about the typos, it is 2:09 AM and I've been up since 6 AM. Hope this helps, I am heading to bed, good night and good luck.

thanks

I don't think any 486 mobo BIOS does support larger drives that 8GB at all.

Let alone the speed. Some drives won't even run on this board because the firmware was set to DMA66 or above by the manufacturer (you can however change that with tools from the manufacturer's website in most cases)

Also there are ISA network cards - I got a dozen in my room - but none of them run at 100MBit. It wouldn't work that fast anyway because the bus is so slow.

You can try adding another NIC and setup load balancing. You should get little more throughput but I don't think the ISA bus can handle it.

If I was you, I would use the 486 system as a print server and get a cheap computer. You can get a good system less than 500 US dollars. Printers uses a lot processor time, so it will be slow if you are trying to get some data from it.

Hard drives that has 8 megabyte of cache only helps on video, sound, graphics, and database applications.

Keep in mind the ISA bus a 8 megabyte per second limit. One hard drive can output more than 8 megabytes, so RAID 0 will not work well.

If you have EISA slots, you can go with that. Its a 32 bit slot and it can output more data. EISA cards are very hard to find these days.

ah, no good news. i want to use the 486 machine because it's damn small. i have an extra 500mhz athlon cpu, i guess i could try and just find a small mobo to fit into the 486 case. anyone know of a small square athlon motherboard (inexpensive would be nice). i guess this way would save me some time, i have an extra pci nic and a 32 meg stick. but any suggestions on an athlon motheroboard? ... and i'd have to get a new power supply....