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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!'"

40 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. Power by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Power by Polymorph2000 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Power by AaronD12 · · Score: 4, Informative

      The specs for the dual G5 2GHz model state a 700W power supply.

  2. 2.8 TB? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    2.8 Terabytes?! I thought a 1.4 MB floppy was enough for just about anybody.

    1. Re:2.8 TB? by Altus · · Score: 3, Funny


      oddly enough... although there is enough space for the 7 harddrives nceessary to get to 2.8 TB there is not enough space left for a 1.4MB floppy drive! :)

      --

      "In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson

    2. Re:2.8 TB? by Greedo · · Score: 4, Funny

      A floppy drive ... on a Mac? Now that's news that matters!

      --
      Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
  3. Ventilation? by scottblascocomposer · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I don't know... The cooling system in the new G5s is pretty well thought out, I don't think I'd want to go cramming things where they don't belong for fear of messing with airflow.

    Of course, now that we're going liquid cooled, some of that will be less of an issue, but overall the case still needs good airflow if it's going to stay cool (i.e., not melt), right?

    --
    To reign is to serve.
    1. Re:Ventilation? by bersl2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yes, but how much heat do you think 7 hard drives put out? Answer: a fuckload.

  4. More drive space is always nice by cheide · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

    1. Re:More drive space is always nice by Valar · · Score: 2, Funny

      *applause*

      And, by the way, the reason they don't do RAID in the powermacs is because they already offer RAID in their real power user machine... the xserve. Of course, g5 xserves don't appear to be happening (ship date gets pushed back, back, back) anytime soon.

    2. Re:More drive space is always nice by spicyjeff · · Score: 4, Informative
      Of course, g5 xserves don't appear to be happening (ship date gets pushed back, back, back) anytime soon.

      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

    3. Re:More drive space is always nice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:More drive space is always nice by jimmyharris · · Score: 2, Informative
      Of course, g5 xserves don't appear to be happening (ship date gets pushed back, back, back) anytime soon.

      We (Australian EDU) have ten dual G5 cluster nodes - they arrived at least two months ago.

    5. Re:More drive space is always nice by Valar · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Ok, I guess I should clarify. G5 xserves don't seem to be happening where I work, because IBM can't meet demand for the chips in question. Thusly, our xserves and the xserves of a lot of other people have been delayed for... well, awhile. Yes, I know, they are shipping some. But a lot of people can't get theirs yet :|

    6. Re:More drive space is always nice by Hungus · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Why the smeg are you going off on me? I am not complaining about the lack of product, if I wanted a G5 Xserve I could go pick one up. The units just are not shipping at the levels one would expect. I was commenting on the fact that the grandparent to my post said none were shipping and the parent replied they had one. I was merely then suggesting that the GP should have said they were not shipping at reasonable levels. Is wrong to complain about shipping levels for production equipment? You seem to think so, but I certainly don't.

      Steve Jobs has made me more money that anyone other than Bill Gates and crew, and while I own PCs (like the Via Eden embedded systems) they serve no working purpose for me. I was born on a PDP 11, but I will die on a Mac. That doesn't mean that if I choose to be I wont be critical of a company however, but in this case I wasn't.

      Apple isn't stupid, they have a reasonable idea of the demand for something like the G5 Xserve. The issue is not the processors but some other factor, I don't know what, but then I haven't asked anyone I know out at 1 Infinite Loop about it either.

      I am no fan of intel and as a matter of fact I have only ever purchased 1 intel X86 proc for a PC ever and it was when the 386/16 was hot stuff. So take a step down off of your AC Soapbox and read the posts before you go off and blather incessantly next time.

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  5. Limits by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    2.8 Terabytes and still only one free hand...life's just not fair.

  6. Ahh yes, it's time once again... by piecewise · · Score: 2, Funny

    ha ha ha ha.

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  7. Re:Sweet Jebus... by Puggs · · Score: 5, Informative
    *Looks at pictures again, just to make sure*

    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*

  8. Re:Sweet Jebus... by whodunnit · · Score: 2, Informative

    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?

  9. Re:Sweet Jebus... by Strange+Ranger · · Score: 3, Funny

    > ..if they didn't go into the exact same space.

    Did you miss the fact that the poster states he is directly quoting the author of both articles? Whom it seems had far more to go on than pictures.

    > They'll let anybody post these days, won't they?

    Oh fer sure! But we'll mod you Flamebait.

    --

    Operator, give me the number for 911!
  10. External arrays by Hungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I have 7 drive spaces (plus the DVD burner) in my Quicksilver 2002 but I have routinely run my systems with external drives. A dremel tool and 10 minutes of work make a nice slot on an expansion slot cover (what do you call those little metal strips anyway?) and I feed the ribbon through and into another case. No problems with having enough power (seperate power and ventilation) oe heat build up. Why force the drive to be internal? I would rather have a lower system temp than internal drives.

    Note this does not assauge the geek factor of mounting 2 different hacks in a box where one should be and I admire the thought, I just think external via SCSI, Fibre, or Firewire is a better solution and it needn't cost any more.

    --
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  11. Heating Issues by Polymorph2000 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's insane putting that many hard drives in that small of a space. Many HD's that close together is just asking for a heat related failure, plus the additional hard drives will obstruct the hot air outflow at the back of the G5, and they'll generate a fair amount of additional heat. Add in the additional cables and this will case a drastic increase the case temperature leading to more noise and potentially component failure.

    You can't just cram hard drives into a case as long as there's an open drive bay. I've put 3 hard drives in adjacent drive bays with one 80mm fans for cooling(I now use 2 30mm fans per drive)., and all of the drives overheated causing drive failure and data corruption.

    Combining these two ideas will likely cause several of the drives to die within 6 months or less due to the extreme heat.

    1. Re:Heating Issues by Polymorph2000 · · Score: 2

      "Redundant hot-swappable power supplies and cooling modules enable the system to keep running"

      Each drive is inside an enclosure with some form of dedicated cooling but this article is talking about putting a bunch of hard drives into small spaces with no dedicated cooling other than the normal case fans.

    2. Re:Heating Issues by Twirlip+of+the+Mists · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --

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  12. MOO! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Moo hah hah!"

    Not to be overly picky, but the correct usage is Mwahaha!. Moo hah hah makes you sound like a retarded cow.

    1. Re:MOO! by jellomizer · · Score: 3, Funny

      Moo hah hah makes you sound like a retarded cow.
      A retarded cow that is pretty bad because normal cows a already really dumb.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  13. You say inside, I say outside by amichalo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You say Tomatoe, I don't know how to spell it, but the point is that I don't see a whole lot of users needing all this storage capacity at their desktop. I think of my local workstation as a place for my OS, applications, and a temporary workspace. The file server is for storing source and production files, and sharing them too.

    Yeah, if you are working on some 200 GB photoshop image, having it local would be the way to go...but who works on a 200 GB photoshop image?

    I would RATHER have a large network storage device that was backed up, RAID 5, etc...not unlike the Xserve RAID.

    --
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    1. Re:You say inside, I say outside by protohiro1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      EXACTLY. Everytime I here people complain that they are doing video editing and they need x TBs of RAID storage in their g5 I want to scream: you don't want that, you want an external disk array. Online editors have always used external arrays and the xserve RAID is the perfect tool. Easly swappable drives. Fibre channel. Its the perfect video editing array.

      --
      Sig removed because it was obnoxious
  14. leave additional storage space OUTSIDE by valmont · · Score: 4, Informative
    1. buy a G5 with the smallest hard drive possible
    2. add external drives over firewire
    3. ...
    4. profit!

    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?

    1. Re:leave additional storage space OUTSIDE by proj_2501 · · Score: 2, Informative

      internal expansion will continue to become a thing of the past.

      pci audio interfaces are being replaced by firewire and usb2 devices which conveniently lie outside the noisy pc case.

      storage is more easily added and cooled in an external enclosure

      the only things not adequately served by external expansion busses are video adapters and RAM

  15. 4 or 5 bay Firewire case? by torpor · · Score: 3, Insightful

    i know this might sound dumb, considering i have no clue if such a thing even exists, but why not just get a firewire case thats capable of housing 5 or 8 or so disks, and using that instead?

    seems to me someone has to have made that kinda mammoth firewire enclosure by now ...

    --
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    1. Re:4 or 5 bay Firewire case? by FredFnord · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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

      --
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    2. Re:4 or 5 bay Firewire case? by drsmithy · · Score: 2, Informative
      How do you figure? Firewire's pretty darn fast...

      ~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 ?).

    3. Re:4 or 5 bay Firewire case? by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 2, Informative

      You could install a PCI-X Firewire RAID controller.

    4. Re:4 or 5 bay Firewire case? by martinX · · Score: 4, Informative

      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."
  16. RIP Floppies... by WiseWeasel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Do you realize how much data Apple's saved forcing people to use more reliable storage and transfer methods? Floppies should have died long before Apple rightly banished them, and should definitely not be used by anyone this day and age, unless you have some sick fondness for losing data. You can plug in and use an external floppy drive if you really must have one, but you'll be much better off using flash memory, hard drives, optical media, or electronic transfers, as they will be much more reliable and cost-effective. Only an idiot would use a floppy by choice these days.

    --
    "I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
    1. Re:RIP Floppies... by shaitand · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "Floppies should have died long before Apple rightly banished them, and should definitely not be used by anyone this day and age, unless you have some sick fondness for losing data."

      The problem is apple didn't banish them, and you can't banish the floppy without having some other standard removable cross platform convient AND GLOBALLY AND UNIVERSALLY ACCEPTED removable media replace them.

      Without a doubt there are better solutions, gazillions of them... the problem is that none have ever caught on. I suppose one day the CD may catch on, but cd burning isn't as simple as floppy copying and rewritable cd's are too damn expensive.

      Unfortunately for the Mac users, Apple does not define the desktop. The IBM PC Clone world defines the desktop... Apple cannot banish anything.

      For better or worse Apple is now #3 on the desktop with no real growth in sight. On the good side they don't seem to be shrinking either... there is just another wolf growing and it's not the Mac users that wolf is taking.

    2. Re:RIP Floppies... by capmilk · · Score: 3, Insightful

      When buying a Mac you can choose between two things: CD burner or DVD burner. That should be about as much "standard removable cross platform convient AND GLOBALLY AND UNIVERSALLY ACCEPTED removable media" as you could ever need (until 2005 that is).

    3. Re:RIP Floppies... by Greedo · · Score: 2, Informative

      I'm putting my money on USB keychain drives becoming the new, cross-platform data transfer method.

      Or maybe iPods.

      --
      Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
    4. Re:RIP Floppies... by Onan · · Score: 2, Insightful

      At the time apple dropped floppies, there already was a global and universally accepted alternative: networks.

      There had been previous attempts to replace floppies, by companies like iomega and syquest. They eventually failed not because of anything related to the implementation details of their products, but because the entire premise of removable storage was already on its way out, obviated by universal network connectivity.