Pci Addon Card





Large-disk support on old computer?

I'm trying to figure out if I can have reliable large-disk support to a VERY old PII computer via a PCI addon card.

Longer story -- I have an offer for a free PII Compaq tower. It's plenty fast to run what I want (a ultra lightweight file server OS) but the pitfall is it can't support large disks and what it can support is very slow (guessing ATA-33 or less). Ideally, I'd use terabyte SATA drives and install a spare 10/100 PCI NIC that I got free from a friend.

I don't care if it can boot from the larger drives but I need massive capacity and fast write speed for creating/maintaining the a software-RAID it would have and moving data between the SATA drives.

Would a PCI addon do this? Or would I still be limited by the BIOS drive capacity restrictions? And would it be fast moving data between drives on the PCI controller, or would that be limited by the PCI bus speed?

PCI add-on cards have their own BIOS, so you'll be able to overcome the size limits of your computer's BIOS.



Items Recently Purchased From This Site:

LaCie FW400 PCI 3 Port Firewire Addon Card Windows/Linux/Mac, Addon Wireless LAN PCI (Wi-Fi) Card ADD-GWP110v2, NETGEAR RN12P2GE-100WWS PCI Addon Dual Gigabit Ethernet Card for ReadyNAS 3200, Rightward PCI Riser Card for RAID Wifi addon card Rackmount ATX Desktop mini ITX,
Powered by phpBay Pro

Tags: , , , , , ,

Posted by Computer Pro on Aug 6th, 2009 and is filed under Computer Equipment.

Trackback from your site.

Add this post to Del.icio.us - Digg

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.