Not recommended
Started playing around again with old hardware. Downloaded the latest checkpoint on chia.net and synced in 30 hours. More details here:
Now that this forum is back up and looks to have proper moderation going forward I will be around here more than I am on X.
In fact I am finishing up this thread on this old Optiplex 760. Good to be back
Awesome, and welcome! 30 hours is a lot, but lower than I’d have expected 
I didn’t expect it to sync at all, but my past HDD efforts were on old 2.5" laptop drives 
My one attempt was on a modern 7200 RPM drive - and took ballpark a MONTH.
I suspect it would be half again that now, as that was quite a long time ago.
Attempting to sync from genesis block or via checkpoint download?
The funny thing is that the CPU doesn’t appear to make that much of a difference in all the tests that I’ve done.
Do you have a list of all the old systems you’ve tried (and whether or not they worked) recorded and shared somewhere?
I have a western digital 500 mb drive that is 17 years old that still works. Granted it hasn’t been running for half of that time.
Compaq Presario SR1920LA (Pentium IV 524, 3GB RAM limit)
C2D MacBooks from 2006-2009 (6GB+ RAM works)
Old netbooks (Intel ATOM, 2GB RAM limit)
Alienware M17 R1 (QX9300)
Dell Optiplex 760 (C2Q 9650)
Custom Pentium IV 651 build (in progress)
The most interesting thing to me is how little the 64-bit CPU matters while running the full node and farming off a few HDDs if using something like antiX, Lubuntu and I assume Adélie Linux.
I was able to get away with 6GB RAM in the past, but considering RAM is so cheap on these old systems you might as well go with 8GB if your board allows for it. There are some old netbooks that could take up to 4GB RAM, but those are so rare that it would be unlikely people would have those laying around or received.
No 2.5" HDD has been able to stay synced in any of the MacBooks I tried and I’m not sure it will make a difference in a desktop, but perhaps I can try that.
The 7200.11 Seagate 1.5TB HDD from 2008 surprised me as not only was it able to catch up relatively fast, but stay synced. Even lightly using the system with the full node running caused no issues.
I had a bunch of pictures on twitter, but I tend to scrub my timeline every year or two so most of them are gone.
My favorite was this MacBook that was headed to a landfill. Took it, cleaned and upgraded and ran well, but the 3GB RAM limit was the issue there.
I think that should work and can still download and extract the db all on the same drive for now. No longer able to do so on the 320GB hard drives that some of those old MacBooks shipped with.
Issue might be the drive slowing down as you near it’s capacity limit over time.
Also ran it on a steam deck, but no surprise it ran smooth there. Even plotted a K32 on it, but can’t remember the time it took. Thinking ~45 minutes or so.
Primary issue is I/O, not processing time or difficulty.
Checkpoint downloads did not exist at the time. I suspect that they came into existence due to my weeks of complaints about that issue (likely not just me though).
Yeah still surprising how low we, well I guess really just I can go.
My guess is that this will eventually be rolled in as an option in the reference wallet once the big cleanup happens.
It’s nice to have been a part of all this so early.
A contest for “oldest hardware to run a full node” would be awesome but seems you’ve already set a really high (old) bar.
