An ODE to my Cheap, Quiet, and Versitile NAS

I've had the same Pentium 3 motherboard with a P3 800e chip running for almost seven years now. Its purpose over the years has changed greatly though. When I first picked it up I was 17 and traded a cheap set of car speakers for it.

When I first got it, it had a 20gb hdd and 128mb of ram. I used it to play old games until I got a p4 laptop for my birthday and totally forgot about it.

Then I started messing with server software and pressed it into use as an internet gateway with windows NT4. It crashed frequently due to what I eventually discovered was a bad hdd cable...

My server in 2001

We moved to California from North Carolina and it moved with me. Since it was a most unreliable internet gateway, our family bought an internet router and my server became a free agent. I experimented with all kinds of software from mail servers to game servers, it still came in handy the most for backing up files during my frequent formatting runs on my other computers. Thanks to my trusty server, I have been able to archive almost every photo and file I have ever saved.

Over the years it has been retrofitted with parts needed to keep it useful - a SATA controller for storage drives, a gigabit LAN card for more bandwidth, more ram for hosting applications... But the motherboard and CPU have never had to be upgraded.

The great thing about the pentium 3 chips was their incredibly low power consumption and heat dissipation. My board is almost always room temp and the chip is usually 4-5c above room temp. The fans spin at 20% throttle and are almost whisper quiet. The power supply in my box is 85 watts - total. Since theres no need for processing power in a NAS, its a win win.


As it stands now, my trusty server is running Server 2003 and still acts as a file server but it also runs a torrent client and print server. When I need to get into it, I use windows RDP as there is no keboard, no mouse, and no screen.

I use a zalman fanmate2 to keep all of the fans running at their lowest speed and even then the case temp is never more than 2c over room temp. I also attribute the good temps to the case - it draws in air only from the front and across the drives and then out the PSU and exhaust fan, all of the other vents are blocked off.

Pentium 3 800mhz
1024MB pc133 SDRAM
Silicon image SIL3512 sata to PCI
Etherlink 1gb NIC
2 Seagate 7200.11 1 tb SATA drive (redundant storage)
1 seagate baracuda 40gb IDE drive(os)