On 3 Dec 2001, at 13:40, Jay Merritt wrote:

> I was thinking about buying a Snap Server. BUT, I realized I have
> some unutilized older PC's laying around. Does anybody know how or
> if I could convert one of these older PC's into a similar file
> server. I don't need the latest in cutting edge technology, and the
> network is only 5 users Windows 98 SE at this time. All ideas are
> appreciated.
> Thanks,
> Jay Merritt

  I've done something similar.

  One of my old (K6-2?  I forget what CPU is in it...) boxes here has
a SCSI card in it and boots NT Server from a 2GB SCSI drive, and then
shares out over the LAN the space on two 40GB UDMA-100 drives that
are handled by a Promise UDMA-100 controller.
  Those are 5400 rpm drives; I could actually have got 7200 rpm units
for less money if I had waited about six weeks.  As far as I can see,
though, the LAN is the bottlenek and not the drives or controller.

  Technically, I believe this is closer to NAS (Network-Attached
Storage) than to SAN (Storage Area Network), in that the space looks
to clients like shared folders and not like shared SCSI chains.

Dave Gillett

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