Investing in an old hardware?

[ubis]

Hello,
i want to get some opinions about this.
Let's start with that i've an old HP D530 usdt (mini-desktop or smth like that ), which got these features:
[*]Intel Pentium 4 HT 2.8GHz(462 socket);
[*]1GB 400 DDRI ram(2x512MB);
[*]One SATA 150 and one IDE/PATA port, oh and one "usable" PCI slot(there is two slot's, but another is in not really good position to use it, it's for cd/dvd drive).

And also i've got another old pc:
[*]AMD Sempron +2600 1.83GHz(a socket);
[*]768MB 400 DDRI ram(512+256MB);
[*]It got 1x AGP8 slot, 2x PCI and 2x IDE/PATA ports, no SATA.

I got in my home network a NAS server which currently runs on that HP d530, but i want to improve speeds.
My guess would be don't waste cash in that old amd computer, since i need to buy a sata driver and a 1gigabit network driver(since motherboard got just 10/100).

Just to take this clear, all i want is to have a NAS server in my home network there should be these services: SMB(CIFS, Samba for windows network), torrent client and a VPN server(that i could connect from outside and check my files).

Well, i need suggestions/opinions what should i upgrade or maybe it's not worth to invest?
First of all, i need to get a gigabit switch, because current router linksys is 10/100, so what i can get from LAN is 100/8 = ~12,5MB/s, i want to improve it for like 80-120MB/s or so.
About 1TB storage should be enough for me, maybe later i could buy larger disks, but from now - it's ok. What i've got currently is: 80GB Maxtor 7200 SATA(i use this one for my internal0 disk, to boot N4F on HP), WD 250GB 5400(2,5" and since HP got just 1x sata port, i use it with 2,5->usb converter) and a brand new SEA 1TB 5400 hdd.
I was thinking to buy an PCI sata 150 driver which supports RAID 0, 1 and buy another 1TB hdd and power them up and use RAID1(mirroring).

Dunno really, it's an old hardware but it still works for me, i just need to improve some speed on samba network. But i don't know, maybe there is another, better way to do smth?


Thanks.

[apollo567]

Perhaps think about buying a HP54L as Base for your NAS...
In Germany you can obtain a base system starting with EUR 160.... plus disks

[alexey123]

I was work with HP D530 motherboard - only 1 issue: it not show CPU temperature.
As for me motherboard work exelent with UFS formatted disks. transfer speeds was ~ 60MB/sec over smb, 40MB/s over nfs, 80MB/sec as iSCSI target.

[ChriZathens]

If you want to keep what you have, get a pci gigabit card and a PCI sata controller
No raid support needed for it, nas4free will take care of raid.
Due to the PCI bus limitations, though, expect no more than 25-30 MB/sec
This will cost you roughly 30 euro - maybe less.
But if you can follow Apollo's advice, then go for the micro server: 4 sata slots (even possible for 5 and hot swap), ECC Ram, gigabit card, low power consumption, internal USB to put a stick for the O/S and your speed will be over 70MB/sec
For that price it's a steal... plus the low power consumption will pay the cost difference back in a long term basis.

[ubis]

Thanks, probably gonna go for microserver.