New Project for Old ThinkPads

[schen]

Much like many on this forum, I have been at this ThinkPad thing for some time and have accumulated lots of hardware that's "in-betwixed and in-between". Not old enough to permanently put out-to-pasture but too old to be front-line daily drivers. Right now; in that category sits my beloved, Titanium-lidded Z61m which is pretty-much loaded up. Not the fastest of anything, but close enough to not be worth gilding the lily! Last summer, I was given an R500 which had a bum fan, which was recently brought back to life. They both have small mSATA SSDs in them loaded with Windows 7 and they run fine. And since they're both confirmed members of "Team-Too-Chunky-To-Travel" (besides, I have a T430s and an X220 for that), they need late-middle-ager type jobs..... e.g. sedentary!

Last year, I took an A31, loaded it up, semi-permanantly attached it to a 2631 Dock. The A31 got another hard drive in one of the two Ultra-bays and the Dock got a third. Then I loaded the machine up with CentOS. Basically, it was a "proof of concept" for the idea of a Mobile Server that can be taken anywhere, set up and serve files to machines logged on to it. It worked fine, but as great as the A31 is and as much as I loved it; I couldn't get around it's limitations such as, single-core processor, PATA drives, and the maximum of 2Gb memory which left FreeNAS off of my OS list!

Where am I going with this? I now have the 2 above candidates for an operational replacement. "ThinkPad Server". So far, my thought are as follows:
Z61m- *Doesn't have really another obvious job.
*C2D T7200 dual core CPU, which is plenty powerful enough for what I want to do.
*3Gb RAM limitation which creates a ZFS capacity limit of about 3-4Tb if I use FreeNAS
*1 UltraBay for a storage drive. Any other drives would have to be external using a USB 2.0 interface, although I do have a "Firewire" PCMCIA card.
R500- *Could do other jobs (Shop computer?) more successfully since it's newer.
*C2D "Penyrn" CPU which is obviously powerful enough for a number of applications.
*4Gb+ of RAM possible so less of an issue if I were to go with FreeNAS
*1 UltraBay so same as above

I can also go different directions with the OS. As stated earlier, I have a MS Home Server 2011 license which doesn't create quite the same issue with RAM memory as FreeNAS, however, I'll be using that at home so, do I really want to be dealing with 2 different OSs? Obviously, FreeNAS is "free" and has the added benefit of allowing me to load it on either the small mSATA SSD or USB stick, thus giving me the 2.5" HDD SATA bay for storage, but it's a RAM hog!

So..... Any thoughts on this? I'm open to any suggestions!

[TPFanatic]

If low memory would be a problem then I recommend you use the R500 for FreeNAS.

[schen]

If low memory would be a problem then I recommend you use the R500 for FreeNAS.

I guess, it really comes down to whether I end up using FreeNAS mostly as a test-bed/practice system, so I don't do something stupid on my main server! Or the other direction and use my MS Home Server license.

R500= FreeNAS
Z61m= MS WHS 2011

By the way, I see that you have an interesting project in your signature with putting a T500 MB in a Z60 body. If you don't mind me asking; how's that going?

[TPFanatic]

It's basically a T500 with a titanium lid, needing bodywork and some thermal mods. The Z60m heatsink, while all copper, is meant for cooler components than what the T500 had to offer. I'll probably switch its CPU to a P-series one since the T9400 really pushes the thermal limits of the heatsink. It's a champ at idle temperatures, though.

A lot of the screw holes are the same between the motherboards, but it took extensive filing of the frame and butchering of the case to fit the T500's board in the Z60m. It runs and operates and I've used it a bit in its current state, but it really needs bodywork... someday I'll get to it.

An interesting thing is the T500 is a little wider than the Z60m and this is reflected in its motherboard which is a little wider as well, so the DVD drive sticks out a millimeter. A better board choice would have been from an R500, since R500 shares a screen connector with Z60m and T500 does not, but I wanted the ATI graphics.

Once the bodywork is done, which I don't have an ETA for yet, but it will be done, I may finally be at peace with what I have done. This is an idea that should have stayed on the drawing board.

[brchan]

I'd say the Z6* series are still pretty different in design than the T500 or 15.4" T61 and probably closer to a 15.4" T60. The Z6* is definately more rounded than traditional thinkpads and have a certain quirkiness that sets it apart. In terms of build quality, they also had decent hinges and the 15.4" displays were very good. Even the 1280x800 screens had 800:1 contrast ratio (since these were also heavily marketed towards multimedia).

[Pete B]

The early version of FreeNAS which is now called NAS4Free did not require
much RAM at all, less than 1GB. Here is the page on it and it is still active:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/nas4free/

It is mentioned here in the History section:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeNAS

[jaspen-meyer]

Obviously, FreeNAS is "free" and has the added benefit of allowing me to load it on either the small mSATA SSD or USB stick, thus giving me the 2.5" HDD SATA bay for storage, but it's a RAM hog!

So..... Any thoughts on this? I'm open to any suggestions!

Debian is a default choice for servers, though any flavor of Linux can serve files.
Debian needs at least 60mb of ram for to run with 64bits (amd64), on production servers 512mb RAM is typical for entry-level boxes. From the basic install you add 'packages' to make it FreeNAS-like.

Debian system requirements
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/ ... 04.html.en

OpenMediaVault - NAS built atop Debian
http://forum.openmediavault.org/index.p ... uirements/
https://wiki.debian.org/InstallOpenMediaVaultOnDebian
http://wiki.openmediavault.org/index.ph ... =Main_Page

Install the OS on it's own partition of the HDD, 10GB is plenty, and use the remainder of the HDD, and Ultrabay, for storage.

The disk-capacity limit may be several hundred million TB, but maybe something will limit the number to less than that. Surely it'll be greater than 16TB.

Each machine packs a ton of processing power. Figure out something to do with it all:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41U78QP8nBk

[schen]

Debian is a default choice for servers, though any flavor of Linux can serve files.
Debian needs at least 60mb of ram for to run with 64bits (amd64), on production servers 512mb RAM is typical for entry-level boxes. From the basic install you add 'packages' to make it FreeNAS-like.

Debian system requirements
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/ ... 04.html.en

OpenMediaVault - NAS built atop Debian
http://forum.openmediavault.org/index.p ... uirements/
https://wiki.debian.org/InstallOpenMediaVaultOnDebian
http://wiki.openmediavault.org/index.ph ... =Main_Page

Install the OS on it's own partition of the HDD, 10GB is plenty, and use the remainder of the HDD, and Ultrabay, for storage.

The disk-capacity limit may be several hundred million TB, but maybe something will limit the number to less than that. Surely it'll be greater than 16TB.

Each machine packs a ton of processing power. Figure out something to do with it all:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41U78QP8nBk

Thanks for your suggestions on Debian. I will definitely look into it as an alternative, however a couple of the factors that come into play on my decision isn't necessarily, what will run well on the hardware. It's whether I own it (WHS 2011) or are already using it at home and so therefore can use this other project as a "sandbox" to practice on (FreeNAS). I appreciate your suggestion and bringing up the rather lower hardware requirements of Debian though. It's definitely worth looking into.