Saved from the tip

I have an old computer sitting under my desk. While it's not fast enough for general purpose computing any more - even running Linux it still has it's uses. However it doesn't have enough disk space for what I plan for it. I already had a spare hard disk to put in it, cascaded down from another that I upgraded earlier this year. The only snag was the old computer only has a PATA/EIDE/IDE controller and the spare disk I had is SATA (which is newer).

I could have scrapped the computer and spare disk and bought new like a good little consumer but that bugs me, so I asked my local Linux group if anyone had a SATA controller card they weren't using, and this one pictured here arrived in the post today. It has cost me a £1 donation to charity - which I will make over the next week. I therefore didn't even have to buy this bit, so I not only saved one computer and one hard disk from the tip, but this card too!

Tomorrow I will put it into the computer to test that it's all working and put Debian GNU/Linux on it.

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