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Most of us have older PCs that we have little use for. Linux advocates often suggest turning such systems into home data servers. A number of people have written how this can be done, with one recent article suggesting the use of Ubuntu. Now, I’m all for the reuse of old hardware wherever possible. It’s damaging to the environment to improperly dispose of such systems, for instance. In business settings, we can often repurpose older PCs and servers in a number of ways. Older PCs often make excellent firewalls and web proxies. By installing an OS like OpenBSD or NetBSD on such hardware, one can get a secure, affordable and yet powerful system. But I’m not sure this holds true for the home data server suggestions.
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Most of us have older PCs that we have little use for. Linux advocates often suggest turning such systems into home data servers. A number of people have written how this can be done, with one recent article suggesting the use of Ubuntu.
Now, I’m all for the reuse of old hardware wherever possible. It’s damaging to the environment to improperly dispose of such systems, for instance. In business settings, we can often repurpose older PCs and servers in a number of ways. Older PCs often make excellent firewalls and web proxies. By installing an OS like OpenBSD or NetBSD on such hardware, one can get a secure, affordable and yet powerful system. But I’m not sure this holds true for the home data server suggestions.
The article I linked to earlier contains these lines which form a good basis for the point I will proceed to make: Your old computer likely has enough memory, and a powerful enough CPU to run Ubuntu, however, if you intend to use this server as a major central file server, it will likely need a new hard-drive. You can deal with that on your own.
The main portion we need to focus on is that part about obtaining a new hard drive. While this may not be necessary, it does begin to highlight some of the problems we will encounter when setting up such a system.
One of the main problems concerns reliability. It is pointless to store data on such a server, only to have an older hard drive fail due to wear and tear. So putting in a new hard drive is almost a necessary task. While storage space is quite cheap these days, a new hard drive may be far too much of an investment to put into an old PC.
Now, the use of an old PC for data transmission, rather than data storage, is more sensible. The hard drive of the system becomes almost inconsequential. The footprint of a usable NetBSD installation can be made very, very small, for example, so space shouldn’t be an issue. Likewise, there’s little loss if the drive does fail due to age. The most that is lost are some configuration files. So that is why such systems often work well as proxies or firewalls; the focus is on passing along data, rather than storing it.
We also have to keep in mind that running a PC consumes electricity. It’s a cost that not everybody thinks about. In some places electricity is quite expensive, and that cost alone could far exceed the benefit derived from having a file server. Furthermore, it will generate heat, which may drive up cooling costs in the summer.
So if you do have an old PC and are in need of some storage space, I think the best thing to do would be to go out and buy an external hard drive. This is especially true if you’d need to buy a new hard drive for the old PC anyways. Such external storage systems are quite portable, and use a small fraction of the power of a full-blown PC. As nearly every modern system supports either or both of FireWire and USB, you’ll be able to use it with nearly any existing PC you own. In the end you’ll get many of the benefits of running another file server, without many of the costs. Full Story |
