My project for this past weekend was to get my development machine up and running, after being in a state of ‘upgrade’ since pretty much July.

The old box was 2nd generation Pentium IV (mpga 478, 400fsb) 1.6ghz, with a gigabyte of rambus and a tired old pata hard disk. The machine served well for 90% of the tasks asked of it, as drawing schematics and reading datasheets is not very tasking work. However, when it came time to prepare the pcb layouts for photo-lithography, the graphic files were huge (300mb+), and the poor p4 just swamped under the strain. So, I had planned to upgrade my ‘gaming rig’ that summer, and was going to move the old gamer up there to work off it. The old gamer however, had other plans, and decided to be unstable after it was retired. So, I just abandoned the entire project for months. Later in the fall, Newegg had a special, to clear out the now obsolete Athlon64 socket 939 chips. You get a cheap board and a cheap chip for $89, shipped free! So I grabbed two; elitegroup kn1 lite and athlon64 3400+. The kn1 lite isn’t that bad, it has the nvidia ultra4 chipset, a pci express x16 slot, plenty of ram slots and other connectors. The 3400+ is nice, running at 2.2 ghz, it also supports powernow and will scale down to 1 ghz when idle.

Specs:
CPU: Athlon 64 3400+ socket 939
RAM: 2GB Corsair XMS PC3200
Mainboard: Elitegroup KN1 Lite
Video: Biostar GeForce 6200
Drive: Hitachi “Deathstar” 250g sata

So I built my new dev box and it was nice, and quiet too, like most of the athlon64’s I’ve built. Not wanting to suffer the pain of a tired old pata drive, I built the new box with a 250g sata drive pulled from the old gamer. After I had loaded all my software, I had used about 6gig of the 250. This little fact had started another project, my quest for diskless computing.

The box ran great! XP booted in under 30 seconds. There was copious ram and bandwidth for dealing with pcb layout panelizing. Only one thing continued to gnaw at me; and that was wasting a huge drive on a box that didn’t need local storage. Sure, I could have bought a smaller drive, but that didn’t make sense … a 40g sata drive costs over $1/gb compared to the $0.40/gb I paid for the 250. I was conflicted, and that led me to ignore the computer. So, without a dev workstation, I had an excuse to not do any development work. Then I finally decided to give diskless computing a try!