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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!'"
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.
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.
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...
2.8 Terabytes and still only one free hand...life's just not fair.
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*
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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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.
"Moo hah hah!"
Not to be overly picky, but the correct usage is Mwahaha!. Moo hah hah makes you sound like a retarded cow.
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.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
A floppy drive ... on a Mac? Now that's news that matters!
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
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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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
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
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)
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."