I picked up a few 200mgz ibm business machines at a show really, really cheap aabout a year and a half ago, just to play with, make workstations out of, etc. I set one up as a file server here in my office and DANG, it is the nicest thing I have ever had. There's no way I could go back. I put an 80 gig drive in it, set it on my desk with a reasonably priced KVM switch and linksys router, and it has served me tirelessly ever since. Now, when someone in the livingroom is lilstening to mp3's, they aren't coming off my hard drive. My own drives aren't taking a beating from indesriminate downloading/deleting, and the automation perks are amazing. Any cron-type jobs i need done are over there, and when downloading large files I don't have to waste resources on my PC, which gives me more for my actual work.
Just as a tip to anyone who is cramming huge drives into their machine, don't overlook old, supposedly-obsolete machines as workhorses. a 200mgz machine can be bought for 25-50 bucks if you catch the right guy, and will run 99% of all software in existance well. Sure, you're not gonna do design work on it, but think of all the repetitive, system-draining stuff you do *while* you are designing that you can shuffle off to the server.
sorry to rant on, but I honestly could not do without it now, especially since my workstation isn't the only workstation on my home network. I see several here that are putting huge drives in their machines, and this is really prefereable to me.
p.s. anything from a p90 on makes a darn good webradio/mp3 stereo as well.
