SPCR

I've done a search and looked the the past posts and haven't seen anything addressing this. I need a hard drive that's no where near the cutting edge.

I have a qube2 running as a firewall and an email server. It runs like a champ after all these years, except the high pitched whine of the drive is driving me crazy, even put in a cabinent inside a closet.

Two issues replacing this drive:

1. It needs to be under 5400 RPM (the qube draws very little power)
2. It needs to be under 33.8 GB (max drive size the qube can see).

So I need something old and slow. Speed isn't important to me, and neither is storage. Right now I'm getting by fine on 6.4GB.

Any recommendations?

You might consider getting an old 4200 rpm notebook (2.5") drive and encasing it a'la Isaac Kuo.

neat idea, but the inside of a qube is very small and there's barely enough room for a regular hard drive.

I have an old PII box running IPCop as a firewall, and it has a 20GB single platter Seagate ST320410A HDD (rescued from a PC which was being junked). It's absolutely the quietest drive I've ever heard, bar none - you can hardly tell it's running even up close to it in open air.

You don't say where you're from (showing your location in your profile is always a good idea), but I know the drive is still on sale in some UK outlets for around £30.

Failing that, you could look for something like a 5400rpm Maxtor Diamondmax 16 which has a capacity limiting jumper enabling you to clip the capacity to 32GB, so that the BIOS of an older PC can recognise it. I think 40GB was the bottom of the model range although they might be getting hard to track down now.

I've googled a bit, and it's getting quite hard to find retailers still stocking 5400rpm desktop drives, so best of luck...

How about a 3600RPM 6GB CF-card drive? Those things are absolutely silent, far more silent than any 5400RPM notebook drive.

So if the drive is bigger than 33GB, doesn't it just show as a 33GB drive? So couldn't you just get the smallest new drive you can get?

lm wrote:So if the drive is bigger than 33GB, doesn't it just show as a 33GB drive? So couldn't you just get the smallest new drive you can get?

It depends on the particular BIOS. Some will just recognise the first 32/33.8 GB (depending on how you calculate it), so you could create a partition up to this size and be OK. Some just won't see the drive at all though, hence why some HDDs have capacity clipping jumpers.

It's not such a problem in Linux, as the OS doesn't use BIOS calls at all to access the hardware, so you could put a 300GB PATA drive in an old P1 with an 8.4GB BIOS limit and it should still be completely useable. The gotcha though is if you want to boot from it, the BIOS has to recognise it so it can find the bootloader in the first place...

lm wrote:So if the drive is bigger than 33GB, doesn't it just show as a 33GB drive? So couldn't you just get the smallest new drive you can get?

From what I've read, it just won't work.

Hi, another vote here for a laptop HDD as being ideal as they are quieter and lower power (and hence cooler) than any 3.5" drive. In the UK 20-30GB laptop drives are readily available, as are kits that come with rails to fit it into a 3.5" drive bay and adapter for the power and data cables.
The drives are about £35 for 20GB, 2MB, 4200rpm to £45 for 30GB, 8MB, 5400rpm. The adapters are only £5-10 too.
SPCR Recommended HDDs (including 2.5" drives)
Seb

IMO,
you are an ideal candidate for a CF card. but forget all this 6GB talk..

- a firewall and an email server will have no issues with regards to write cycles.

- providing you use decent software, space shouldn't be an issue atall. i don't know how much space you are using now (probably more than u need to?), but to give you an idea, right now i am posting from an old 'pc' running windows 98 se (w/ 98lite etc).. via wifi no less. with ability to rar/zip etc, play mp3s/aac/mpeg2/divx etc, remote access with VNC and more. on a 128MB CF card (ie 121MB in real life).. and, with over 20MB free
so, with efficient use of software, u can easily do what you want.. that is assuming u dont store years worth of emails with multi-MB attatchments on them on your server. (and even if u do then u could get a slightly larger one)

- its silent, not just quiet, for all practical purposes, it produces no heat, and it uses less power.

- its small (since u said a normal hdd was a tight fit)

- its cheap!.. i paid £15 for my card and adaptor, delivered. (probably from around US$20).
when u feel the content of your emails or whatever are getting too big, then upgrading is even cheaper (due to the ever-falling prices/increasing capacites.. and u wont need another adaptor).

you could quite easily use an old CPU and PSU passively (if u don't already) and have a (virtually) silent server

IMO you have two possibilities:

1. Buy a laptop drive. There are mounting kits available, which enable mounting to standard 3.5" drive bay.

2. Buy a 3.5" drive, and jumper it to clip the capacity to 32 GB. This can be done at least with Samsung drives (and I'd think that this is the case for other manufacturers as well).

IBM/Hitachi has a tool for their drives; I once needed to clip a 20 GB laptop drive to 2 GB in order to get it to work in an old laptop.

Cheers,

Jan