Use my old MESH PC as extra Hard Drive for my Dell?

Jimlad

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I would like to use my old Mesh PC as an extra resource/hard drive for my Dell PC. Can I do it?

I bought a MESH Ultima A1100 in November 2000. Its spec was as follows:
· AMD Athlon 1.1 GHZ CPU.
· 256 SDRAM PC133 ECC .
· 45GB 7200 RPM HDD with 2MB Buffer.
It is still working OK but I needed a PC with two built in hard drives, considerably more memory and an ability to drive two monitor screens to enable me to edit my video.
So I now have a Dell precision 370 Minitower. Its spec is as follows:
· P4 3.2 GHZ/800MHZ intel EM64T 2MB Cache.
· Memory 1024MB
· 1GB DDR2 400 NECC Dual Channel Memory (2x512)
· 250GB (7200 RPM) SATA Hard Drive with DataBurst cache
· Additional 400GB (7200 RPM) SATA Hard Drive with DataBurst cache.
Can it be done and how do I do it with my limited knowledge onPC s

Jimlad
 
You could:

1) Take the IDE drive out of the Mesh and put it in the Dell - this might be tricky as your Dell disks are SATA. Also, do you physically have room in the Dell?

2) Network the two PCs together

3) Take the 45GB drive out the Mesh and put it in an external USB/firewire caddy and use it as an external/portable drive.
 
i just got a new dell the other week, it had 2 SATA connections and one IDE that will connect 2 drives, one being the dvdwriter it came with. you should be able to connect one IDE drive that way

or if you don't want to use a caddy, you can get a PCI RAID/IDE card (about £12 or so from SVP.co.uk or other places) which will take up one PCI slot and give you 2 IDE channels, which will let you connect 2 devices to each - ie. 4 IDE hard drives. you might need to get power splitters, they are about £1 if bought online

in my dell 3100 i have a total of 4 IDE hardrives inside, plus 1 SATA HD and 1 IDE dvd writer, plus i have a USB caddy with another drive

a bit OTT perhaps, but i got a new HD just before the pc and wanted to make use of it. i had to get the raid card as i needed another channel, and i thought i may as well use up the old drives i had lying around

so from svp you can get a USB caddy for £15 or a raid card to let you use everything internally, saves you having cables and power etc outside the pc
 
Thanks Stiggy & Unique. Have read & thought about what has been said and feel I may not be up to taking the risk as I see it of taking bits out of the Mesh & putting them into my new PC. Currently it is networked in my system. So could you or anyone else advise if its possible to do away with the old PC mouse & keyboard and use my main PC Mouse & keyboard to operate the two PC's. I did disconnect them and it wouldn't start up as it had not found the keyboard or mouse.

Jimlad
 
Jimlad said:
Thanks Stiggy & Unique. Have read & thought about what has been said and feel I may not be up to taking the risk as I see it of taking bits out of the Mesh & putting them into my new PC. Currently it is networked in my system. So could you or anyone else advise if its possible to do away with the old PC mouse & keyboard and use my main PC Mouse & keyboard to operate the two PC's. I did disconnect them and it wouldn't start up as it had not found the keyboard or mouse.

Jimlad

shifting HD's between computers is really easy. if you google you should find some step by step instructions and pictures. try the cnet site as they used to have guides with pix. theres basically a power cable and a data cable, both can only fit 1 way round, if connecting 2 drives on 1 cable you just need to ensure the dip switches are set so one drive is master (the one at the end of the cable) and one is slave. it probably sounds more complicated that it is. it's certainly a lot easier than setting your pc up via networking

if you don't know what your doing, ask around your friends or at work as i'm sure someone can help you. it would take less than 10 mins to take the drive out of 1 machine and put in the other, and boot up to make sure it works
 

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