Lacie Ethernet Disk
Running XP Embedded
a Whopping 128gb of ram
2X256gb HD in a striped RAID
and a nice built in 10/100Mbit NIC
When I got it.. the raid had failed because one of the striped pair died. I decided to open her up and see if it was worth fixing. I popped the top and lo and behold I found a very PC like Motherboard. It had a single pci slot, a single DIMM slot and a lovely “Socket 7″ err socket occupied by that furnace of a CPU called the Cyrix III Samuel 667mhz processor. It was the slowest and hottest of all i686 socketed CPUs.
You are prob wondering, “Why in the hell would you choose such a flaming turd of a CPU to run your NAS?”. Well its a simple answer, It was crazy cheap.. Like 3 bucks a CPU. Pentium 3 CPU’s were a lot more expensive and that would have effected the bottom line. The thought was, the embedded OS would not have been as effected as a normal PC because of the basic tasks asked of it . But the good news is it is socketed.. meaning upgradeable. Yay.
So I started forming a gameplan for upgrading this currently less than useful device.. with things I have around my cave ..and a few cheap purchases. I began by hitting my CPU pile and locating a Pentium 3 800mhz, a nice, cool Fast…err running CPU and plopped it into the socket. Sucess!! ,the Lacie booted and registered the CPU correctly.
Step 1: Done, My Lacie had a new Brain.
For the next upgrade, I took a peek at that DIMM socket. In it I found a lovely 128mb PC133 DIMM. Yes sir, a DRAM. This upgrade will a bit more difficult. I was hard at work in a retail white box store back when this ram was popular, Circa 1999-2000. The popular sizes available then were 32,64,128, and Rarely 256/512 Gigabytes in size. The 512 DRAM was so expensive that well I didn’t have one in my stash of old RAM. I was lucky to have found a 256MB DIMM and I installed that Bad Boy .
Step 2: Done I’ve doubled the Ram.
Total money spent… 0 bucks.
I did have to spend a few bucks to fix the problem the Lacie had that allowed it to end up at my home to begin with. The Lacie originally came with 2×256 Gig hds in a lovely striped array. Back in 2003, 512 gigs of hard drive space was pretty darn good, 2011 not so much. I didn’t want to spend a lot , so I went with affordable drives in a reasonable size. When I went to buy hard drives, it was just after the prices skyrocketed. The hard drive plants in Thailand were damaged severely by massive flooding which forced hard drive prices upward. I decided on 2 500gig PATA hard drives for a total of 1TB of space. They were 65 bucks a piece for a total of $130 dollars.
Step 3: Done. I’ve doubled the hard drive space.
Ok, so now Ive got a faster NAS with more memory and double the hard drive space.. There was one last bottleneck, its main connection to the outside world is a 10/100 Mbit Ethernet interface. I don’t even want to think of the countless hours it would take to transfer data at even 100Mbit speeds. But I did have a plan, on the motherboard I saw a lovely standard PCI slot, the problem was it located in a one U case. The external access to the PCI slot was horizontal and Lacie didn’t include a vertical to horizontal PCI converter. So, off to the magic place that is Amazon. I spent almost an hour trying to locate one converter for my application. I located one that was perfect, and the cost was only $5.40. Score! Next I needed to occupy the new horizontal PCI slot with a Gigabit Ethernet card. I purchased a lovely off brand card that was guaranteed to have built in drivers in Windows XP. This allowed me to plug and play for only 12 bucks. Got all the parts a couple of days later (Thank you expedited shipping!!), and BAM.. I now have a gigabit enabled NAS.
Step 4: Done. Gigabit Ethernet on board.
My Grand total spent $147.40 +tax
For right around 150 bucks, I was able to add enough upgrades to make a NAS from 2003 to once again be relevant and useful in my home network. It runs fast, transfers data with alacrity, and performs almost silently.”
What are your thoughts?