? PC Tower converted to Multiple Drives "server" with no brains/cpu ?

I think it would work, but several drives on one USB 1.1 bus would be deadfully slow. I have a IDE -> USB case, and when I had a HDD in it to salvage data off my G4 (also USB 1.1) copying 10gb took around an hour if I remember right.

if your set on using this machine, get an old pc board, load linux on a cf card, and put it on the ide bus. then put the other drives on a cheap ide pci card. or you could upgrade the mobo in the imac and use firewire. or what i would suggest would to get a cheap power mac or powerbook, and add firewire to it because its gonna be harder to add firewire to an imac then to a power mac or a powerbook. i only suggest this because its gonna be sooooooooooo slow with usb 1.1. especially for a server! and the imac is hard to add firewire to. im not sure if you can swap in the mobo from a newer imac with firewire, but that also might be an option. please correst me if i'm wrong though.

I should add a few other notes:

I was considering doing something like the tower of drives thing for my 2005 model year Inspiron 9300 notebook by Dell. But the fact that the Mac right now has limited drive space made me think about trying it with the Mac first.

The data on these proposed drives will be things like OS upgrades for various Apple OS, How to items, Technical Service Bulletin Type information, freeware that I may pass on to clients charging only my time to install them, etc. Typically I would need less than 1 Gig of data for any given job on a flash drive. Mine would be the only computer using the multidrive tower, too.

The Imac is my only Mac computer (other than when I use my wife's Emac in her home office at the other end of the house) thatI have access to. I have a personal leaning toward the Mac computers, though.

Also, when reasonably possible I like to re-use equipment that may still have a lot of life in it. However I suspect in several months I will end up purchasing a newer Apple as another poster recommended.

David Johansson

I think you missed one step in the Linux idea: put an ethernet card in the Linux machine. Then network the server and the iMac and share the drive space over SMB or NFS or something. That will be MUCH faster than USB 1.1 and you an also have all those shared files on any other machine on the network.

For just a basic file server you won't need a computer with any real speed. A good Pentium or any P2 and up should handle a 100Base-T card and simple file sharing just fine.

Jon seems to have confirmed what I was thought:

Re-using the old PC Tower case with a hub and multiple drives would work poorly. However having a basic computer work as a server would be effective.

Thank you to those who shared their thoughts on the topic.

However I was gifted an old (AMD K63d ?) machine that had the hard drive removed before it was given to me. That machine's case may be able to house additional hard drives, and has it has an A-Open network card already.
That machine may become my "new" server quite soon.

Thank you.

David Johansson

www.freenas.org

I Use freeNAS on a PIII to share an 80gb HD for backups.

It's easy to set up

yeah, i just read over my old post. yes, if u put an ethernet card on it, just use the drives as shares. much faster