upgrading real old notebooks (disk)

My always-on fileserver is starting to drive me to distraction, with the noise it puts out.

Whilst I've been looking at new laptops (for primary use), I've gotten to thinking a nice older laptop might be just the thing to drop the noise and heat level in my office. The always-on (headless) fileserver runs FreeBSD (apache, postfix, imap, slimserver, and samba, but never needs much cpu). It's a 1.4 ghz athlon, but that's way more cpu than I ever even come close to using. Previously used a celeron433 box that was sufficient, but it died an untimely death a few years ago now.

So anyway, I'm looking at various refurb/used laptops (hell, I don't really even need a working display), and wondering:

just how big of a pain is it likely to be trying to upgrade the hard disk? BIOS updates? Disassembling the entire shell, just to get at the disk?

I need to go at least 120 GB, but if I can go bigger than that without too much effort, that'd be even better.

Alternatively, when did the first USB 2.0 laptops come out? An external drive would be okay -- it's just going to sit on a shelf.

 

USB 2.0 came out with the P4 I think. I have an older IBM Pentium III 900mhz which only has USB 1.1. It has a 20gb Harddisk but I think it can handle bigger. I think a Pentium 3 generation laptop shouldnt have diffeculty handeling bigger disks but ofcourse you need PATA.
You can get a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card which should work fine with an external disk but then not sure about drivers for FreeBSD,

 

yeah, I'm expecting driver issues to be problematic for lots of things. I'm game for giving Linux another go, but freebsd is definitely my preference, which means the less non-standard parts, the better!

The most annoying thing is that after finding a decent looking refurb, figuring by the time I add in cost of (ancient, out-of-stock everywhere) memory, and external disk, price isn't that far off from a new laptop.

 

check out external drive boxes. some of them run linux and people do miracles with them, as they are in essence a tiny computer acting as a fileserver...for example the linksys NSLU2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2

 

old still useable laptops are not nearly as cheap as old desktops. the 399$ new ones that i saw in this forum a while ago are pretty good deals but still over kill for what you need.
I would recommend that you stick with the desktop since you already have it. Try making it quite with a new better fan and maybe some noise blocker around the harddisk. I dont think a old laptop will be soundless and replacing an old noise making fan on a laptop costs alot if possible at all. Only benefit i see with a laptop is that it uses less power. I can get mine down to 15watts if i turn the monitor off.