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!'"

Comments

Power

[Anonymous Coward]

The article mentions cooling, but is there enough power (5V) to handle that many drives? Drooping voltages can lead to all sorts of strange behavior.

More drive space is always nice

[cheide]

Personally I think the G5s should have come with three drive bays standard and let you set up a RAID-5 array. Power users like reliability too...

Re:More drive space is always nice

[Anonymous Coward]

What, you mean like systems based on whatever Intel processor they're currently trying to wrest the CPU crown away from AMD?

I say that generically because it's a moving target, those systems are virtually impossible to get ahold of until ~3 months after Intel's announcement. Shortly after supply catches up and ship dates get realistic, another king-of-the-mountain comes out and Intel magically can't meet demand for the new, faster-than-fast, processor all over again.

Intel's gotten away with this for over a decade, now somehow Apple's supposed to change the laws of physics (not to mention economics) to make demand not outstrip supply?

Granted, Intel's track record shows this routinely amounts to preannouncing products, done in a vain effort to "steal thunder" from a competitor who's actually shipping product the day of their announcement. The marketing wonks are in charge at Intel, and man, their current lineup shows this. Thank god the 90nm process effectively derailed their maniacal plan of ever-smaller-processes with ever-smaller-realworld-performance-gains, now they have to concentrate on making well designed processors again without blockbuster clockrate increases.

XServe G5s are shipping. You may not get one for a while. If you've ordered a particularly odd hardware combination that depends on one part that Apple is having trouble sourcing for some undisclosed reason, your ship date may keep getting pushed back... and back... and back...

Just like how if you want the latest "Intel EXTREME! " processor, you will have to play the waiting game. By the time your proc comes in, Dell might have sold out of some other esoteric bit you asked for, maybe - maybe not, all depends on how wacky you want to configure your system.

Wacky/Odd being relative terms of course, nobody outside of Apple or Dell really knows what qualifies, and even internals may not entirely understand since supply constraints - you know, like an earthquake knocking out the sole factory - aren't always predictable.

Re:4 or 5 bay Firewire case?

[FredFnord]

Just bought one from Granite Digital. It's a hardware-RAID-5 4-drive chassis that works with Firewire 400, and it costs $900 or so. The Firewire 800 version costs $1100 or so.

There are alternatives, ones without the hardware RAID that only cost $250 or so, but if you're going for reliable and fast, the Firewire 800 hardware-RAID-5 case is the way to go. (For us, it was reliable and large and Linux-compatible we were going for).

-fred