Topic: notebook server w USB drives

[mike_mattos]

I'm considering building an SME system using an old Compaq notebook, with a pair of Seagate hybrid drives (2.5" w/256M of flash ram, they don't spin the platters when using the flash) in an external USB enclosure.

Wondered if anyone has tried this?  Seems to be a cheap way to get low energy, power outage protection from the notebook battery, and easy to replace/upgrade  the system too.

The system is only for email and low volume web server, performance would be limited by the 500k upload speed limit of my ISP no matter the cpu
 
Mike 

[mercyh]

an old thread but possibly still worth reading

http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=27606.0

[imcintyre]

The way I got involved with SME V6 was using an old laptop as a file server for probably 5 or 6 people in an office. I did not use USB disks, just the internal hard drive. It worked great at the time.
I recall a post in which the poster was trying to do the same thing and was asking about pcmcia network cards so it could be server-gateway. So you may need to do some searching.

[mike_mattos]

http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=27606.0  suggests heat as the main problem, so I will remove the internal hard drive and use external power for the USB drives,  screen will go off with SME anyway,  perhaps I'll add a small fan too. That should solve the heat, I'm trusting INTEL to throttle the CPU while idling.

If second NIC becomes an issue, I can use a d-link router & DMZ everything to the SME address, I don't need the SME server as a gateway. 

Last issue, is SME 8.0 a better choice than 7.3 given the PCMCIA and USB hardware ?   I prefer 8.0 because the PHP and MySQL are more up to date anyway.

thx

[imcintyre]

I never had a problem with heat and we left it on 24/7 for a couple of years.

[cactus]

Last issue, is SME 8.0 a better choice than 7.3 given the PCMCIA and USB hardware ?   I prefer 8.0 because the PHP and MySQL are more up to date anyway.

SME Server 8 are still beta and should only be used for testing. Concerning MySQL and PHP: Security updates and fixes are still released for the current releases of PHP and MySQL, so security wise it should not be a problem that they are not the most recent version, featurewise they most likely are a bit outdated indeed.