dual p3 question

[joshwa]

It can also be a BIOS thing, but there were bios updates for nearly all motherboards to allow them to use drives bigger than 137gb...

[aidanjt]

Ah yes, I thought it would be a controller issue was well.

[joshwa]

and if the bios update doesn't get it working, there's also software from the hard drive manufacturer you can use to make sure you can use the full hard drive...

[weebroonieuk]

ahh cool thanks joshwa i might go for one of them then to bung my other drives in and just keep my sata drives ( only got 2 at the mo) in the p180 and stick the ide drives in a p3 pc in a cupboard or something

[DanceswithUnix]

i was wondering about the 137 gb limit but couldnt remember if that was os or mobo limited

A bit of both.

I find that under Linux if I can get the machine booted then it will take any drive I throw at it. That sometimes means booting from a smaller drive though.

[DanceswithUnix]

a bit exotic ? you can pick em up for buttons so why not have a dable with it i thought

When Ebuyer will sell you a new PC (no monitor) for 150 including VAT, getting something old from ebay would have to be very few buttons indeed!

[weebroonieuk]

yes it is very few buttons, have a look yourself and see you can pick up dual p3's for 50 quid delivered and under sometimes

i bet a dual p3 would perform better than a single cpu celeron or sempron crippled chips i would never buy either of those chips

it wont "just" be used as a fileserver , i might use it as a firewall too or something like that

in other words i just want one , just wondering if they are decent on power to run 24/7

[DanceswithUnix]

yes it is very few buttons, have a look yourself and see you can pick up dual p3's for 50 quid delivered and under sometimes

i bet a dual p3 would perform better than a single cpu celeron or sempron crippled chips i would never buy either of those chips

it wont "just" be used as a fileserver , i might use it as a firewall too or something like that

in other words i just want one , just wondering if they are decent on power to run 24/7

OK, toy value I can cope with However, I believe that a modern sempron would wee all over a dual P3, mainly thanks to the modern RAM, faster FSB, modern hard disk interfaces etc.

Found this site for power consumption:

http://www.benchtest.com/calc.html

so it looks like each CPU will take 20 to 40 watts, depending on which CPU you end up with. 80W would be a bit of a sting

As for 'just' a fileserver, I was up until quite recently running a K6/2-400MHz as fileserver, name server, mail server, firewall and VPN encryption server. You need plenty of RAM to avoid going into swap, but it really doesn't take much to keep up with a broadband connection.

[weebroonieuk]

cool i might go for a single cpu thing there even cheaper will have a scout about later on

[directhex]

It can also be a BIOS thing, but there were bios updates for nearly all motherboards to allow them to use drives bigger than 137gb...

it's both. at work, we had some dual p3 systems, with the 137gb limit - and we needed to use 200gb disks. the bios only saw the lower amount, but once linux started booting, it saw the lot. the important thing was for /boot to be in the first 137gb of the disk

[directhex]

so it looks like each CPU will take 20 to 40 watts, depending on which CPU you end up with. 80W would be a bit of a sting

but a sempron would be 90W, so it's not all bad

[aidanjt]

Well, I have an Athlon XP 2500+, 2x256MB PC2700 sticks in DC, 1 120GB system disk, and 2x160GB disks stripped for all my data running off a 320W PSU.

Its running just about every peice of networking software I need with 0s load average. Not to say I never do anything, its just a home enviroment, the stresses on the CPU are non-existant.. heck, i'd say you'd get away with using a P3 500Mhz and 256MB of PC100 just so long as you have a good quality hardware RAID controller (if you're going to have a beefy array).

[weebroonieuk]

yeh id spend more on the raid controller as everything would have to be mirrored

im waiting till the bigger drives come down in price as i dont want the likes of 8 250gb drives to make 1 mirrored terabyte

[aidanjt]

I really wouldn't use RAID 1 with that kind of volume, you'd be far better off using RAID5. You'd end up with a JWOD (Just a Waste Of Disks) type array

[weebroonieuk]

its been a while since i read on raid and cant remember raid 5

im actually thinkin g of waiting till 600gb drives appear so i aqtually see terabytes in windows and not gigabytes


my plans are to archive my dvd collection , favourite ones will be stored in plain iso so i dont lose picture quality, all the rest i will convert to xvid's of around 1gb each

i also religously back up my ps2 games when i crack the case on them i put them in pc first so i have a perfect scratch free disc iso'd and burn my backup and use that

i will be backing up my xbox 360 games when i work out how to do that

plus lots of digital video and photo's and music so need plenty space to store


so i want to build a box with maybe a couple of tb to last me for a long time i hope!

how would i do it and how many disks for raid 5 and how does it back up everything without using the same number of disks?

[DanceswithUnix]

but a sempron would be 90W, so it's not all bad

90W is the thermal design power of the socket 754 processor family. AMD are pretty conservative with their TDP (unlike Intel) and none of their devices ever get that high.

The actual power consumption flat out is lower, and on idle is something like 20W. These results seem pretty typical:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu...-venice_6.html

I think with cool n quiet turned on the idle consumption gets down to about 7W on the latest processors!