Questions about an old system

jdallen5

jdallen5

I'm thinking about getting my old sony VAIO PCV-R553DS system running again as a samba/ print server and I was wondering if any of you guys are familiar with the old ultra AA/66 hard drives. I'm pretty sure it doesn't support 48bit LBA so will I have problems putting more than 127gb of hard drive in this thing? If so, can I get around it by installing one of those PCI SATA controller cards or would it still have that limitation?

Thanks in advance for any info/help-

Jim

PS- here's a list of the specs-

Model
PCV-R553DS
Processor
Intel®
Pentium®
III Processor 650 MHz
†
Cache Memory
128 KB Integrated On-Die Level 2
Standard RAM
128 MB PC-100 SDRAM, expandable to 256 MB
Hard Drive
30 GB
††
Ultra ATA-66 Hard Drive
DVD/CD-ROM Drive
16X max. DVD-ROM
40X max. CD-ROM
CD-RW Drive
32X max. CD-ROM read, 8X max. CD-R write,
32X max. CD-R read, 4X max. CD-RW write,
8X max. CD-RW read
Floppy Disk Drive
3.5" 1.44 MB Floppy Disk Drive
Video & Graphics
Intel®
810 Chipset (Direct AGP)
Modem
V.90 Modem
Ethernet
10/100Base-T Ethernet card
Expansion Slots
Four PCI (three occupied)
Expansion Bays
Two External 5.25" Half-Height (two occupied)
One External 3.5" (occupied)
Two Internal 3.5" (one occupied)
Port Connectors
Two USB (one front/one rear)
One PS/2®
Mouse
One PS/2 Keyboard
One VGA
One Serial
One Parallel
One Game/MIDI
One 6pin i.LINK
One 4pin i.LINK
One Headphone Out
One Line In
One Microphone
 
My server was a P3 800 until about a year ago ... I had little problems other than the speed limitation of ATA and the NIC.

I had a 400GB drive. I used the 400GB drive on my AMD K6 300Mhz before that without problems (Not as boot drive though).
 
Ok, sounds good. I may just pull the trigger on a larger PATA drive then. I can always use it on one of my other systems if it doesn't work out. Have you had any experience with those PCI controller cards? I know they don't write as quickly as a normal SATA but I really only need the space not the speed.
 
Well, PCI is 133MB/s max. Also remember that the (onboard) NIC also runs through the PCI bus. So your speed is severely limited by today's standards ...

Other then that, I have little experience with PCI SATA cards on FreeBSD ...
 
jdallen5 said:
Ok, sounds good. I may just pull the trigger on a larger PATA drive then. I can always use it on one of my other systems if it doesn't work out.
Click to expand...

Since FreeBSD doesn't use the BIOS after booting, I'd think it wouldn't have a problem. Can't say I've tried it with a large PATA drive, though. (Actually, I'm pretty sure I ran FreeBSD on systems that had smaller limits--32G?--and used larger drives maybe 40G or 80G. Details are fuzzy, CRS syndrome strikes again.)

Have you had any experience with those PCI controller cards? I know they don't write as quickly as a normal SATA but I really only need the space not the speed.
Click to expand...

Probably not a serious bottleneck. SAMBA itself isn't very fast. And a SATA drive plus controller might be cheaper than a PATA drive alone. Be careful, last I saw a lot of the cheap SATA boards had Silicon Image controllers that were reputed to, well, suck.
 
The 137GB limit is an address limit, so there is a good chance that limit will be hit. That said, you can still put in any size drive and still use it, up to 137GB.
 
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