PCI Promise PDC 20376 SATA IDE e-SATA controller card

[Juan Jose Bora]

Hi everyone!

I'm about to acquire this card in order to be able to add some SATA (and SATA2) disks to an old PENTIUM IV 1.6GHz, in which my FreeNAS is running (and booting from a 4GB stick).

The question is: Is this card going to work properly? Because I couldn't find it in the Disk Controllers Compatibility List, here http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.3R/hardware.html#DISK.

Any comment will be of a great help.

Thanks.

 

[cyberjock]

If it's not listed its probably not going to work. I wouldn't spend money on it if I were you.

PCI is a big bottleneck for servers which is why all server class harware from before PCIe came about used PCI-X.

Not sure what your plans are, but a P4 for a server isn't too useful, and I can't imagine adding more disks is going to do anything except make things worse. You should probably consider just building a whole new system with the appropriate SATA ports already, ECC RAM, and appropriate processing power.

 

[Juan Jose Bora]

I know all that.

My server is only going to work as a "dumb" storage, for personal usage, to store garbage files that I don't want to throw away yet. In fact, it won't be necessary to have it alive all the time, only if some data inside is needed. In fact, I won't use ZFS and I'm thinking of not even using UFS, and I won't use any type of RAID whatsoever.

The thing is, I have four old 80GB IDE disks and a 500GB SATA disk plus a 2.5" 500GB SATA disk from an old laptop, and I was looking forward to give them a use. All these disks work perfectly and I came up with the idea of setting up a server, just to give these disks a use.

Speaking of the hardware, I take the opportunity to ask whether is going to be up to the challenge. CPU is P IV 1.6GHz with 512MB of RAM (PC133).

Thanks a lot for the answer.

 

[cyberjock]

ZFS and UFS are the only 2 file systems you can safely use with FreeNAS. I can totally agree with you not using ZFS because of RAM, but you can't go with anything that needs "less" RAM than UFS. It was first created in the 1960s or 1970s.

Nope. You're going to have major problems since the boot partition is cached in RAM on bootup(its 1GB). So no.. you need to look at 2GB minimum without using ZFS.

 

[Juan Jose Bora]

The alternative for FileSystem would be NTFS. I can import pre-formatted NTFS partitions. But now that you mention that UFS would take less RAM, I think I'll go for it.

For the RAM limit ---> Oh, d4mn! I'll see what I can do about that.

Thanks a lot for the answer.

 

[cyberjock]

With only 512MB of RAM you might be able to get by with Windows Server 2000 or something, but nothing "current" has any chance of making a server for you. :(

 

[Juan Jose Bora]

I don't need anything "current", I only need to put these disks on my network, that's all.

Thanks a lot for the answer.

 

[cyberjock]

Server 2000 should work fine. Just don't put it on the internet.. without patches for years it is a security risk waiting to happen :P

 

[Juan Jose Bora]

OK, thanks! I'll have it in mind!

 

[gpsguy]

Or Server 2003 SP2. Extended support runs through 7/14/2015.

Server 2000 should work fine. Just don't put it on the internet.. without patches for years it is a security risk waiting to happen :p

 

[cyberjock]

Yeah. It recommends minimum 256MB so less headroom in the RAM department. But it does have patches that are current.