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2.8TB in a Power Mac G5?
Pfhreak writes "Bare Feats has a couple of reviews: one of WiebeTech's G5Jam, and one of the Swift Data 200. Both add extra drive space to a G5. The G5Jam puts two extra drives in the space that would be taken up by long PCI cards, so you'll be limited to the shorter cards in two of the three PCI slots. The Swift Data puts three drives in the space in front of the CPU fans. The writer of the Swift review has an interesting thought in the conclusion: 'Hey! Maybe I could install both the G5Jam and the Swift -- that would give me 7 drives -- and if I get seven 400GB Hitachi 7K400s, that's 2.8 Terabyte total -- Moo hah hah!'"
NO, they dont go in the same space - one (the G5Jam) goes in the space in front of the PCI slots; the other (the Swiftech) goes down the bottom at the front between the air intake for the CPU's and the fans.
*wonders if parent looked at the pictures*
Apparently your eyes aren't so great,
The Swift Data 200 puts the drives down in the bottem left of the case where the PCI cards would normally go, While the G5Jam puts it's drives in the space between the powersupply and the area where the cards are, suspended off of the case side. These are 2 distinctly different sections of the case. So both kits would in fact fit.
They'll let anyone post comments these days won't they?
At 5V it uses 780mA per drive (http://common.ziffdavisinternet.com/util_get_imag e/6/0,1311,sz=1&i=67140,00.jpg).
780mA * 7 = 5.46A
Apple uses a 450W - 650W power supply in their G5's (http://www.welovemacs.com/g5serviceparts.html), and they should be able to support this (650W give something like 40A on the 5V line).
Although I don't know what the power requirements of the other components are, or how well the power supply handles the load.
if you're dealing with a desktop system in the first place, provided you have a clue or two about arranging your space, and choose some nicely stackable drives such as the ones offered by LaCie, you would avoid cluttering the guts of your G5. Hopefully you'd structure most of the disk usage around your external drives so THEY'll do most of the spinning while your internal drive remains cool, and your G5 fans don't run all the frickin' time. Long gone are the days of painful SCSI chains. Firewire is crazy easy via hubs or daisy-chain.
or something?
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Um, so the XServe G5 that has been in our server room since March isn't out yet? Wow, should I return it then? :-p
Each drive is inside an enclosure with some form of dedicated cooling
No. The drives are just on sleds, little metal brackets that facilitate insertion and removal. The "cooling modules" are hot-pluggable fan assemblies that are built in to the back of the chassis, back behind the midplane and outboard of the controllers.
I write in my journal
~80MB/s shared between 5 - 8 drives vs a 150MB/s SATA channel for each drive. You do the maths.
It might not matter for 1, 2 or maybe even 3 drives, but any more than that being piped through a single FW bus (particularly if the drives are RAIDed) is going to be *much* slower.
Not to mention the FW800 on the G5s is probably hooked into the regular PCI bus, whereas the builtin SATA controllers and any addons would probably hook into the PCI-X bus(es ?).
You could install a PCI-X Firewire RAID controller.
Firewire on the G5 has sucky performance.
" The PowerBook G4 does sustained WRITES to the dual drive RAID set faster than the G5 Power Mac! I've included a graph below to highlight the issue. Something is radically wrong with the built-in FireWire 800 controller on the G5 when the Dual 2GHz model gets beat by PowerBook with a single G4/1.33."
FW on the G5 is not fast enough for HD video.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
We (Australian EDU) have ten dual G5 cluster nodes - they arrived at least two months ago.
The specs for the dual G5 2GHz model state a 700W power supply.
I'm putting my money on USB keychain drives becoming the new, cross-platform data transfer method.
Or maybe iPods.
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