Make a NAS out of an old PC

[FMQ203]

So, my friend's parents had recently buyed a new PC for one of there employees and they want to make allocate their Shared Hard drive in a separate PC to act as a server, so, the thing is, the old computer is really old;

 

3.0GHz Pentium 4

1 GB of DDR RAM

(I think) Nvidia 6800xt

 

I thought of putting there FreeNAS, but:

 

-Would the hardware support it

-Would electricty cost be too high to run it 24/7

 

It would be nothing more than a file server, no streaming from, or anything else

[TheSLSAMG]

Don't worry about power output, since 200W isn't going to kill your electric bill.

[Ryan Leech]

I don't think the Pentium 4 has support for virtualization.

[Sheldon]

I don't think the Pentium 4 has support for virtualization.

Why does the CPU need to support virtualization? 

[needmorewood]

I don't think the Pentium 4 has support for virtualization.

y do u need virtualization? 

thought vitualization was for virtual machines only.

[FMQ203]

y do u need virtualization? 

thought vitualization was for virtual machines only.

 

same here

[T Unit959]

FreeNAS should work. Don't use ZFS for your drives unless you want to completely slow that machine down. You need at least 4GB of ram to get any performance out of ZFS drives. Using UFS would be better for lower end machines like this. Take a look over here for more info: http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Hardware_Recommendations

[flibberdipper]

Just don't use ZFS. It sucks on slower hardware.

[Guest]

My PC runs a hundred percent of the time as it won't sleep or turn off fully

[Avuntia]

If i was in your place i would run windows for the simpleness because every pc in my house hold is a windows i would go for xp, as an alternative i would run linux which is really simple. i would use them as i can run other application just in case. i have a pentium 4 with 756mb ram and run 2 virtualbox linux machines and windows with a websever, printsever, fileserver etc. if you want a really simple file server i would go free nas,

Yes your hardware should support it no prob.

electric bill hmmm, i would not be really high however what iv done is installed a timer application that turns off the server after 11:59 each day and in the bios i boots up at 8 am. This is the only times i need it. it cut my power by half and also my data is a bit safer

good luck