Home Network

I currently am using my old PIII machine stored in my closet as a file and print server. It's plenty of power for what I need, but it doesn't support SATA and other modern protocols, so I can't load it up with disk space.

I'm going to add a PCI SATA controller and two Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB drives to Mom and Dad's old Dell Dimension 4550, which is a bit more advanced than my PIII. I'll then install Ubuntu Server using software RAID, and I'll use this as my new file and print server. I considered running OpenFiler on it, but I'd like to do more things with the OS, and the OpenFiler's out-of-the-box iSCSI isn't a useful feature for me right now.

Total cost of upgrades will be about $225 ($200 for drives, which I got on sale at NewEgg, and $25 for the controller). This is nonoptimal in terms of speed -- the point of these Caviar Black drives is that they're super fast -- but it's cost-effective and fine for my needs. A new NAS would have cost at least $250 not including the drives.

Virtualized Setup

Justin Lin tried to convince me to virtualize my workstation (Dell Inspiron 531) and consolidate to a single machine. It's a 64-bit Athlon, well-suited for virtualization. I investigated this seriously, but ran into some roadblocks:

• The BIOS only supports 500 GB drives. I upgraded the BIOS, which I hope will expand the capacity, but I haven't confirmed that.
• I would have to upgrade the RAM. This is a minor issue.
• Justin suggested using VMware instead of Xen. VMware Workstation costs $180 (Justin thought it was free). VMware ESXi is free, and it ideally is the better solution, because it runs barebones (no host operating system), which in theory frees up resources. However, because it's designed as an enterprise solution, it has poor hardware support.
• I still need to figure out what to do about my printer. I could either move my printer into my room, buy a wireless printer server, or buy a new wireless printer.

When I upgrade my workstation, this will probably be the more cost-effective solution, as I will only need one computer, which will save power and space. However, it doesn't seem worth the additional cost to upgrade my current system.