Use old PC as server

I have 3 SATA laptop Hard Drives which I would utilise in some way, preferably I would like to join them together (though USB) to my old PC (really old - 500MB of RAM) and somehow use that as a home "server" so that I can access any of the files from the computers around my house (Linux and Windows). How hard would that be to do? Could you include some easy-to-follow setup tips? Also would it be possible to access the information remotely (outside of my LAN) through the internet? Is that something I would have to pay for?

(I would prefer to have the main router with a dynamic IP but I have a spare one I could use for the server with static IP if needed.)

Jakub

Posted 2013-12-29T19:57:59.673

Reputation: 315

1You should learn the very basics of what a server is if you have such questions. – user1306322 – 2013-12-29T19:59:57.797

To build a server you first need some server hardware. You have an old desktop. – Moses – 2013-12-29T20:11:53.977

5I have a file server built out of an old HP workstation, you don't need server hardware. – Michael Frank – 2013-12-29T20:15:31.993

What are the sizes and model numbers for these drives? – cybernard – 2013-12-29T20:51:27.887

I don't think there is one straight answer for this. As for your hard drives, stick them in an old desktop computer case and there you go, you'll have your own storage location. "Serving" this information to your other machines is a whole other ball game, though. Look into sharing between Windows and Linux with Samba. Accessing your data remotely depends on how you want to access it, what type of data it is and what you do with it. If you just need access to the machine, look into SSH on a Linux system. You'll of course need to configure your ISP router to forward those requests internally. – canadmos – 2013-12-29T20:54:42.220

Perhaps your easiest option would to be to set up a simple secure ftp server. – canadmos – 2013-12-29T20:58:06.347

USB will limit you to 30mb/s assuming you even have USB 2.0. If the disks were similiar in size you could use software RAID 5 and get combined max around 90mb/s. Internally via SATA, EIDE or SATA to EIDE would be faster. – cybernard – 2013-12-29T20:58:21.210

How fast is network card in old PC? 10/100 or gigabit or something else? – cybernard – 2013-12-29T21:00:06.250

The 500MB of RAM is going make the system perform slowly. There are many things you can do slooooowly but performance will probably make you want to pull your hair out. – cybernard – 2013-12-29T21:38:46.487

lots more information would be nice. What kind of PC? What interfaces do the HDDs use? – Journeyman Geek – 2013-12-30T01:19:20.280

Answers

Grab a SATA card (make sure you get PCI or PCIe, whichever your computer supports) and slap those drives inside the computer (also make sure the PC has the space necessary, and power connections). The SY-PEX40008 has 4 ports and is known to work with darn near any OS you'd want to use.

I'm assuming these drives are the same size. If not you'll have plenty of "fun" using them together.
Pick and OS and run with it. I'd recommend FreeNAS or OpenFiler, both free software that's meant to be run as a SOHO file server. Both will easily run in 500MB of RAM.

If you use FreeNAS I recommend configuring the drives in a ZFS RAIDZ pool. This will sacrifice one drive's worth of space for redundancy (so when one of the drives dies or otherwise goes bad you don't lose all your information). For OpenFiler use it's RAID5. Also, critical data should be backed up... like to media other than this server.
Share files using SMB/CIFS (Samba) or WebDAV (works particularly well over the Internet, usually served by Apache or nginx), or both (what I do).

Linux can easily use NFS too, but you might want to leave that out for simplicity sake. FTP is horribly insecure and nobody should ever use it anymore (except serving public files). There's also SFTP, but this requires you setting up SSH and isn't natively supported by Windows clients (SMB and WebDAV are natively supported by Windows, Linux, MacOSX, and more).
If you enable WebDAV you'll want to configure Port Forwarding on your modem/router for ports 80 and 443 (or just the latter, as it's encrypted). Configure an external Dynamic DNS service so you can access the server from a domain name (eg my_server.dns_provider.com).

If you enable WebDAV over the Internet you'll really want to secure it with SSL. You can get a free certificate from http://StartSSL.com.

All of the above have their own guides on the Internet for how to procure, install, configure them. But if you're having troubles you already know where you can come back to ask more questions.

Chris S

Posted 2013-12-29T19:57:59.673

Reputation: 5 907

I will tell briefly, so take your time searching these because I haven't tried them my self:

You can create a NAS (network attached storage), or RAID cluster whith these 3 drives if they are the same, or JBOD (just a bunch of disks).

The latter two make multiple disks act as one, while the first is like a data server (you probably can do combinations, or just make each disk usb external)

Then use an app like teamviewer running in your "server" pc (that is connected with the disks) to access the data remotely.

selfmade.exe

Posted 2013-12-29T19:57:59.673

Reputation: 78

Also you can use filezilla ftp client for file sharing! – selfmade.exe – 2013-12-29T22:04:59.567

No need for the drives to be the same size in order to use RAID. – Hennes – 2013-12-29T22:06:48.547