New MB recommendations

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Feb 26, 2007, Tony Alfrey wrote:
>I think it's time to get a faster box 'cause I have some linux CAD apps 
>that want more speed.  Towers are clearly cheaper than laptops.  I have 
>SCSI drives on my present Pentium II box.  Does it make sense to try to 
>get a fancy new fast MB, and attempt to plug in these drives or is this 
>silly?

Given the probably age of a PII box, I would say that the life of any SCSI
drives in it are a bit suspect.  I would strongly suggest getting a new
drive for the installation, perhaps using your existing drives as well.

You're probably better off installing a system on a new hard drive, then
mounting your existing drives after everything is up and running.

For the last year or so, we have been updating several of our 4U rack mount
servers, replacing the main boards and power supplies with newer ones, and
updating their Operating systems from old Caldera ones including on 1.3 and
a couple of 2.3 systems to various flavors of SuSE from 9.0 Pro to SLES10.
All of these boxes had SCSI drives of various ages (8 years in the case of
the Caldera 1.3 system).

I just spent a good bit of the weekend fixing one of our servers here that
had four SCSI drives of approximately the same vintage as yours and a fifth
newer SCSI drive.  This box had a main board transplant a couple of years
ago, replacing the Pentium II main board with one with an Athlon 64.  Three
of the four original SCSI drives were questionable at best, and most of the
data is on the new 38GB SCSI, and booting off one of the original 4.  The
old boot drive finally gave up the ghost early Sunday morning.

To make a long story short, I ended up buying a new PATA drive (I think
PATA is a fancy name for non-SATA drives), and doing a fresh OS install on
this system, removing all but the newest SCSI drive which now has its main
partition mounted as /home.

I'll probably be working the kinks out of this box for a while as it
handles our dialup uucp, HylaFAX, and has ``just growed'' since its initial
incarnation running Caldera 1.3 in 1998 or so.

Bill
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