# Can i turn an old Dell Dimension E310 into a media server?



## skinney6 (Jun 9, 2012)

Here are the specs ...
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim3100/en/sm/specs0.htm

If i put in a card like this...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115072

how many drives do you think it's 230w powersupply will run?

Can I boot from a drive on that card? 
or do i have to keep one of the IDE drives to run the OS?

I already upgraded to 2gig of RAM

What else am i not considering?


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## nova (Apr 30, 2006)

Kinda hard to know without all the specifics but a guess would be a maximum of 6 hard drives. Personally I would not recommend using more than 2 HDD with that PSU. Generally HDD units consume about 3W to 4W when idle and 7W to 10W or so during read/write operations. Those are pretty general and will vary depending upon your specific HDD. The biggest issue in my opinion is the PSU supplied in your Dell computer was likely speced out to the bare minimum needed for that computer.
I'd suggest upgrading the PSU if you want to add a bunch of HDDs, the 3100 does not use a proprietary PSU so it should be inexpensive and easy to do.
Don't know anything about that card but it does profess "Bootable Support" so I would assume you could boot up from a HDD connected to it.


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## skinney6 (Jun 9, 2012)

thanks for the reply
I didn't realize it's has 2 sata's of it's own so with that sata card and a 450 psu i'm looking at about $50
i doesn't matter what speed sata right? cuz even the slowest can stream movies (and that's all i want)
i can use unRaid for free untill i need to go above 3 HDD then i gotta pay $70 right?
or is there another NAS OS you'd recomend?


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