Large-disk support on old computer?

Question

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?

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

You would be limited by the bus speed. All this transferring of data still has to be processed by the CPU.

Answer 3

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Answer 4

You need to update the bios I think.



Or you can create a bunch of partitions, and mount them all. Thats what I would do.

Answer 5

hi mat M, i caught what is going on cause you said it is slow so when it gets like that reboot when you see your windows logo start tapping f8 this will bring you to a safe mode screen scrol down to last good configuration when my system acted correctly (advance) when you get to your desktop hit start>programs>accessories>system tools scrol down to system restore there you see a calender hit the first lit number to your left your system will restore then reboot. when you get back to your desktop hit start>settings>control panel hit the internet options icon there delete your history and your cookies then exit now go back to system tools and scrol down to defragment this is a very important step so make sure you complete it. good luck hope i was helpful to you