Many of you out there have old clunker computer boxes using XP where their sole purpose in life is to be home file servers.
An issue with older BIOS chipsets on those old clunky boxes is there’s a smattering of them out there that will not recognize any hard drive that is over 128GB in size.
But did you know you can plug in a hard drive using external USB, and guess what – it will recognize the full size up to 2TB – even if the USB port is only 1.1 compliant? Yes, it will.
If you have one of those old clunky file servers with XP that has a BIOS that won’t see large HDDs, plug one in using a USB caddy and you’ll get the full size recognized.
Quick questions answered
Q: Why bother doing this when self-contained USB big drives are available?
Cost. Those who have home file servers and use them regularly usually have a USB hard drive caddy kicking around somewhere. The purchase of a big drive alone hooked up to an existing caddy is cheaper than a self-powered/self-contained solution.
Q: Why would anyone use an old home file server these days?
The more appropriate question is why not? If you have an old but functional computer box, you might as well put it to good use.
Q: What qualifies as a "server?"
Any computer. If it sits there are serves anything, it’s a server. For example, if you took an old Dell Latitude C600 (released originally in 2000 and easy to come by), plugged in a big-size USB drive and used it to store files, that laptop is now a server.
A file server doesn’t have to be physically large. It just has to be a computer that’s network-able, works and has a USB port for the bigger drives. File transfers will obviously be slower, but it works and makes a computer that’s otherwise unusable usable again.
Important final note
Some of you may get the idea of actually using an old computer box with an attached USB big drive regularly. This is fine and you won’t encounter any issues – unless you try to use files over 2GB in size. Older computers with XP or 2000 may crash (as in "blue-screen") if you attempt to directly access large files, even if the file system is NTFS. The reason for it is that the OS simply runs out of memory. This is important to know if you’re attempting to do anything on a local-to-the-box level, such as moving DVD images or creating/modifying large ZIP, 7z or RAR files.
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