Thinkpads Forum

I have a T21 that has become too old, weak and slow for manual use any more.

However, I do have a need for a file server for the house, and I realized that the T21 mobo is probably as low power as I'll ever find a motherboard.

Any clever ideas about reusing a Thinkpad mobo as a captive server?

For the home file server I am using Compaq Proliant NAS, unfortunately it's a "little bit" different from "ThinkPad server" as the Proliant has the 6x 10k80G drives in RAID5 + dual cooling fans and dual power supply (and their additional fans). So the noise level, heat level and power consumption of ThinkPad can be really nice and you can put it to some closet, garage or basement.

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R.G. wrote:I have a T21 that has become too old, weak and slow for manual use any more.

However, I do have a need for a file server for the house, and I realized that the T21 mobo is probably as low power as I'll ever find a motherboard.

Any clever ideas about reusing a Thinkpad mobo as a captive server?

Funny that you ask. I'm (actually I have been) in the process of doing something similar with a 600x that my son outgrew. What I intend to do is to somehow turn the machine into an NAS for my network at home. To that end, what I've accumulated so far besides the 600x is a SelectaDock III with the SelectaBase 600 needed to fit the machine. What I need is a good sized PATA HD that will fit in the drivebay of the SelectaDock III, and a PCI USB 2.0 card so I can attach one or more external HDDs.

That's the plan so far. I imagine you could do something pretty similar with the 2631 Dock that has a PCI slot in it and would allow you to install a USB 2.0 card and then attach external HDDs to your T21.

If you want to squeeze some throughput out of it, and assuming it has a CD-ROM drive or even a USB 1.1 port -you could load a myriad of LINUX Live builds onto the system and depending on which flavor and how maxed out your gear is / you can boot the entire OS into RAM and that old T21 will end running faster than alot of newer gear in your house.

Most LIVE distros have a simple /copytoram boot flag which will offload all the modules off the CD into RAM state and you can remove the CD and and the system is so quiet and runs so cool its spooky !!!!

Several distro's will let you boot off a USB drive and since the distros are designed for an 800MB CD, an inexpensive USB drive is cheap and fast to load up your operating system.

Continue to use the heavier T21 as a desktop or park it as a NAS and close the lid so the cats don't try to sleep on it.


Just in case you didn't already have this list, visit FrozenTech's web site for the current list of LiveCD choices and several of the "Desktop Replacements" will still include the NAS modules along with an easy to use KDE type shell .

If you're loading the OS into RAM, you can keep your existing HDD as your NAS host and every LINUX flavor can support NTFS / FAT / FAT32 as storage partition while a large majority can even operate their kernel from Win32 file systems (although poorly) but this compatibility ensures you can remove the NAS drives for other systems in case your T21 conks out or you just feel like swapping drives.
http://www.livecdlist.com/
Another neat, but will require capital,
You can take an Addonics SATA adapter then find a fairly fast 300x or better CF card and make an impromptu SSD that boots and runs windows reeeallly fast, the drawback is the storage space of 8 or 16GB will still cost more than $100 plus another ~$34 for the SATA <-> CF adapter and traditional IDE storage will be the bottlneck.

In the 2631 you could also put in a PCI card with 4-port USB2.0 as well as an Ultrabay 2000 2nd HDD adapter with a 250GB PATA/IDE HD. Another Ultrabay 2nd HDD adapter in the T21 with another 250GB, plus replace the native HD also with 250GB and you have a T21 with 0.75 Terabyte of storage!
Hard to beat (IF you can find those HDs).