Building Tower For 1st Time, Please Help :)

Part of the point, I guess was missed. For the most part, you can use the same drives in the new machine.

Here's what happened to me with the new Core 2 Quad board.
Even with all the new learning and research, I did not realize until I had the board in front of me, that it had only one slot for IDE.
It had gobs of SATA plugs. For the other old board that had the Pentium 4, I found a Chips board to replace it, that had all the old tech slots I needed. It had two IDE slots and plenty of PCI slots to use all the old hardware. The new board Asus, for Quad, presented a little challenge. I am a sucker for convenience, so I used the one IDE slot for the two internal DVD/ CD machines (master & slave). I waited until the local Fry's had a good sale on SATA drives. I bought two. I suppose someone on the forum can explain better than I can, the benefits of using SATA.

Because I prefer to have a lot of extra space to store digital photos, I still had two sizable IDE drives left over. I found a neat little attachment circuit board at Fry's that just plugs into the IDE slot on the drive, add power, and plug in a SATA jumper cable from one of the SATA slots on the board. About $30.00 expense. Worked right off.

For the old unit, I had been testing the benefits of SATA by using a converter card in one of the PCI slots. MAXTOR was including these cards in with some of their drives. It gave you two SATA ports and one IDE port on the same card. I was experimenting with using the SATA drives in external enclosures. I put an adaptor plate on the back panel. External SATA cable plugs are different from internal SATA jumper cable plugs.

They even had cards that plugged into the PCI, that gave you two or 4 extra ports for IDE drives. (you can put two on each cable off of each port on the card). Which might be your answer to using all your old drives.

I only had a few PCI slots on the new board, and they were taken up with things like a modem and a Pinnacle Video input board.

I suppose there are many out there that advocate RAID where you have an immediate back up of all your data. I never understood it, or could afford it at the time, so I depended on using separate drives to back up a project I was working on. Even with three massive UPS, I have had problems with power and weather related data loss. The detachable drives were just my insurance. (Texas weather, unreliable power companies, and internet services sometimes get to be a real headache.)

On a final note, the SATA drives use a different power plug than the PATA drives. If your power supply does not have the plugs already on the cables, you will have to add a jumper/adapter. Some of the new SATA drives come with the jumper/adapter in the box.

I am sure some of the other guys can correct or add to this.

Tejasmed

 

OK, back from my hols, I'll respond to all the threads that haven't had a million posts since I left. This is one of them.

I tried USB networking for a while (the interim period between when my server's old motherboard stopped working with network cards to when it stopped working altogether). It works, but it's slow, and the software can be restrictive.
Far better is to use Gigabit networking, CAT5E, or CAT6 if you want to feel special (or go super long distance... )
I use Putty to go to my server as a means of interfacing with it's command line OS without needing an additional monitor. If you're happy to plug in a monitor to the PC to set it up (you need not have one all the time, and indeed as I found out recently, you don't even need a graphics card!) then Putty isn't necessary. It's merely for advanced config only. Any other configs can be run through webAdmin, a web-browser based GUI control panel. The usage of the server itself is simple, using the Ubuntu's Gutsy Gibbon CLI OS you can run Samba file sharing, a system that allows you to map an entire hard drive as a shared network area. Simply map a network drive to this share name in windows, and you effectively have direct attached storage, drive letters and all. Almost all programs can be installed to and run off this system with the single exception of Steam.


All I have to add to your most recent post is that you must not use both the S-ATA power connector and the traditional molex if the drive has both (typically WD drives). If both are present, use one or the other.