Uwe Schindler wrote:
I have been running an Alpha XP1000 at home for the last three or four years (ever since it was discarded by my workplace) and it has served me well and has done all that I asked of it (a multimedia machine with a PVR card for recording analague television and playback of recorded MPEG files and DVDs). I am impressed by all that this nine year old computer has managed to do.The same here, too. I was inpressed, that an old AlphaStation 500/500 was (and is still) able to handle the needs of a modern computer. The only problem today is the graphics problems with X.org. But for me this is not the problem, as my AlphaStation is running as server only (and the console works perfect).
Yes, I am considering that option too. Keeping the Alpha as server and TV (both analogue and digital) receiver/streamer. It does that much very well.
The given AlphaStation machine is perfectly booting from a SCSI ZIP drive (containing /boot) just to have a SRM-able boot drive instead of the 3,5" disk drive (I did not want to have a always spinning small hard drive for booting). This handles over to a cheap 10$ SATA (!!!) controller having large SATA disks
Yes, I also have a cheap SATA controller with SATA discs (including the CD/DVD drive) installed. Nice. Better throughput than the on board Qlogic SCSI. But I still have one SCSI disc in the system for no other purpose than to boot it - I hadn't thought of using a ZIP drive to enable me to remove that last SCSI disc. I also had a cheap USB 2.0/Firewire card in it but that was removed to make room for the DVB-T tuner card since all PCI slots are filled. I currently use the eSATA port to connect to my external drive when needed for backup and file transfer. But if I turned it into a server only I could remove the quality surround sound card and reinsert the USB 2.0/Firewire card.
Then I would only need to purchase a new computer to be the media playback centre. Cheers Michael.