What do you do with an old, loud, hot fileserver that’s acting up: crashing after a couple days or weeks of use? What if it’s full of obsolete IDE drives, and the drive industry is moving to SATA? What if you’re tired of buying replacement IDE parts to limp along just a little while longer?
Well, if you have 5 free SATA ports… you buy 5 of the best bang-per-buck 1.5TB SATA drives and upgrade! Here they are fresh out of their static bags. They don’t take up too much space, do they?
And here they are in a birdsnest of wires, hanging out the side of the case while the filesystem is formatted and all the files are copied over (which took about 12 hours):
And here’s what I got to pull _out_ of the computer: over a dozen IDE drives between 200-400GB each, several feet of IDE cable, a drive tray, a stack of power cables, and the 3 PCI cards it took to hook everything up to the motherboard. Plus a 120mm fan that kept it all cool (not pictured):
What did I gain? Well, so far, no more crashing. And things are cool enough that I could remove an extra fan, making it quieter. The new drives takes up about 1/3rd of the space and use about 1/4 the power of the old setup. And capacity has more than doubled to almost 5.5TB!
Now… time to Ebay a stack of hard drives… 🙂