2.8TB in a Power Mac G5? 104
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!'"
Power (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Power (Score:1)
Re:Power (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Power (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Sweet Jebus... (Score:5, Informative)
NO, they dont go in the same space - one (the G5Jam [barefeats.com]) goes in the space in front of the PCI slots; the other (the Swiftech [barefeats.com]) 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*
Re:Sweet Jebus... (Score:2, Informative)
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?
Re:Sweet Jebus... (Score:4, Funny)
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.
2.8 TB? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:2.8 TB? (Score:4, 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!
Re:2.8 TB? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh yeah! (Score:1, Funny)
RIP Floppies... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:RIP Floppies... (Score:2, Interesting)
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 supp
Re:RIP Floppies... (Score:1)
Sources please. Oh wait, this is
Re:RIP Floppies... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:RIP Floppies... (Score:2)
Re:RIP Floppies... (Score:3, Informative)
Or maybe iPods.
Re:RIP Floppies... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:RIP Floppies... (Score:2)
Re:RIP Floppies... (Score:1)
Re:RIP Floppies... (Score:2)
Re:RIP Floppies... (Score:2)
Re:RIP Floppies... (Score:2)
I said iPod, but you may interpret that as any usb/usb2/firewire device that may be used as a hard drive. A small usb (pen) drive is only slightly larger than the usb connector itself, and costs about the same as a floppy drive. [softwareandstuff.com]
if you are using a computer without at least a single usb 1.1 connection, you probably should accept that you have fallen desperately behind the times.
Re:RIP Floppies... (Score:2)
It's no replacement for a floppy drive though.
1. It's not bootable.
2. You need a fully functional OS to be able to use it.
3. USB is extremely flaky. Yes the drives themselves are reliable storage, but USB functionality within the OS, windows in particular is extremely poor and easy to break. In contrast a windows system initializes a floppy drive even when it doesn't really have one.
The most important aspe
Re:RIP Floppies... (Score:2)
the above is partially serious, partially joking... I use windows too, as well as OSX, and Debian. I actually have a new pc (antec aria case... no floppy) where I need to flash my bios, and it is a huge ass-pain.
you have summed up the windows experience quite nicely though:
Re:RIP Floppies... (Score:2)
Re:RIP Floppies... (Score:1)
Granted, floppies are by far the least reliable storage method that is commonly available today, but they are still highly reliable.
Of course I deliberatly chose my digital camera and MP3 player so that they support the USB mass storage mode, so they are my new floppies. (A pen drive is only usable as a pen drive, might as well pay a few bucks extra and get an MP3 player instead.)
Re:RIP Floppies... (Score:2)
Just a few years ago, I would use floppies to transfer data between the campus computer lab and my machine at home.
Apple's lack of a floppy drive becomes less of a liability with each passing month, but that doesn't mean that it's not a liability at all.
LK
Re:2.8 TB? (Score:1)
> I'm not sure what the limit of a BSD label is, but it my be 1TB unless
> you can up the block size (512K blocks plus signed ints yeilds 1TB
> limits). You may want to use fdisk to make a slice for any large
> partitions rather then trying to use disklabel. On the 2TB s
Re:2.8 TB? (Score:1)
Ventilation? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Ventilation? (Score:4, Insightful)
More drive space is always nice (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:More drive space is always nice (Score:1, Flamebait)
And that other guy was right, too! If only Apple had included OGG in the iPod, it would have been a successful product instead of the miserable failure it turned out to be!
Dumbass.
Re:More drive space is always nice (Score:2, Funny)
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.
Re:More drive space is always nice (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:More drive space is always nice (Score:1)
Re:More drive space is always nice (Score:5, Interesting)
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:More drive space is always nice (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:More drive space is always nice (Score:3, Informative)
We (Australian EDU) have ten dual G5 cluster nodes - they arrived at least two months ago.
Re:More drive space is always nice (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:More drive space is always nice (Score:2)
Re:More drive space is always nice (Score:2)
Re:More drive space is always nice (Score:1)
"FireWire 800 RAID is NOT a viable option for the G5. You probably read my rantings on other test reports. Suffice to say that the write speed is slow -- slower than G4 Power Macs and G4 PowerBooks -- slow enough to make it useless for high throughput video and audio".
The point of doing the Swift upgrade is not primarily capacity, but speed. For more info, check out the Firewire 800 speed comparison charts [barefeats.com] at
Re:More drive space is always nice (Score:2)
Re:More drive space is always nice (Score:1)
Limits (Score:5, Funny)
Ahh yes, it's time once again... (Score:2, Funny)
External arrays (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:External arrays (Score:2)
Re:External arrays (Score:1)
Heating Issues (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Heating Issues (Score:2, Insightful)
Twice the drives in the same amount of space. [apple.com]
Re:Heating Issues (Score:2)
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.
Re:Heating Issues (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Heating Issues (Score:1)
It has a couple extra fans, but nothing weird.. just all the fan ports are populated.. 3 fans + power supply I think.
Re:Heating Issues (Score:2)
Re:Heating Issues (Score:1)
MOst cases are not operating at thermal capacity.
MOO! (Score:5, Funny)
Not to be overly picky, but the correct usage is Mwahaha!. Moo hah hah makes you sound like a retarded cow.
Re:MOO! (Score:4, Funny)
A retarded cow that is pretty bad because normal cows a already really dumb.
You say inside, I say outside (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [apple.com].
Re:You say inside, I say outside (Score:2)
Of course, I'd probably go with an external drive or the Xserve RAID and a Fibre Channel Card (yeah, like i've got the money).
Re:You say inside, I say outside (Score:5, Insightful)
leave additional storage space OUTSIDE (Score:5, Informative)
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?
Re:leave additional storage space OUTSIDE (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:leave additional storage space OUTSIDE (Score:2)
Check out this page for the benchmarks:
http://www.barefeats.com/usb2.html
4 or 5 bay Firewire case? (Score:3, Insightful)
seems to me someone has to have made that kinda mammoth firewire enclosure by now
Re:4 or 5 bay Firewire case? (Score:2)
putting that much in one case seems kind of silly..... but then again that's what mods are sometimes about. doing it just because you can.
Re:4 or 5 bay Firewire case? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:4 or 5 bay Firewire case? (Score:2)
I'm not familiar with the Granite Digital enclosure but $900 is not a lot to pay for hot swappable IDE drives and hardware RAID 5 (and presumably also 1 and 0, preferably 1+0) on a FireWire interface. There's nothing to install the host, if it was configured as RAID5 with 250GB disks, it would just look like 1 750GB dri
Sorry, actually got the details wrong (Score:2)
The Granite Digital one is one I evaluated but which turned out to be software RAID, not hardware.
FW Depot also has a really nifty clustering 5-drive RAID-5 box (so it can be used with multiple hosts) that
Re:Sorry, actually got the details wrong (Score:2)
Yes, FW Depot's eRAID System [fwdepot.com] looks very interesting.
Screwed up the details on this! (Score:2)
The Granite Digital one is one I evaluated but which turned out to be software RAID, not hardware. However, if the speed tests I've seen are to be believed, it is quite a lot faster than even other Oxf
Re:4 or 5 bay Firewire case? (Score:2)
Because performance would suck.
Re:4 or 5 bay Firewire case? (Score:1)
Re:4 or 5 bay Firewire case? (Score:3, Informative)
~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 ?).
Re:4 or 5 bay Firewire case? (Score:1)
And I think you're talking out of your ass on your FW800 contention. Unless you've got some data, I am going to proceed from the pretty-good assumption that Apple's engineers wouldn't pull such a boner.
Re:4 or 5 bay Firewire case? (Score:2)
Well, you could, but then it wouldn't really be relevant to a discussion about firewire, would it ?
Not to mention the massive cost increase.
And I think you're talking out of your ass on your FW800 contention. Unless you've got some data, I am going to proceed from the pretty-good assumption that Apple's engineers wouldn't pull such a boner.
Well, it was just a guess. Having gone and looked at the architecture diagram of the G5, it appears the firewire plugs straight into the chipse
Re:4 or 5 bay Firewire case? (Score:1)
Firewire is fast enough for most digital video apps. Need more speed than that? Get fiber channel.
"sucky performance" indeed...
Re:4 or 5 bay Firewire case? (Score:5, Informative)
Firewire on the G5 has sucky performance. [barefeats.com]
" 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.
Re:4 or 5 bay Firewire case? (Score:2)
Re:4 or 5 bay Firewire case? (Score:1)
Not in my experience. My Samsung DV camcorder will not function on my Mac if there is another firewire device active - on either port. I have to turn off my CD burner and disconnect my external 120GB to get clean live video. Otherwise, it just gives a blue screen.
G4 cube, 450 mhz, using iMovie.
Re:4 or 5 bay Firewire case? (Score:1)
Re:4 or 5 bay Firewire case? (Score:1)
I'm running off an external firewire HD (boot drive; long story), with 2 burners hooked up via firewire (but not doing anything, there's another burner hooked up via USB 2.0, for some testing), plus my other external HD (file storage) and I regularly capture from my JVC MiniDV camcorder (usually to an internal drive, but not always). Even did it yesterday.
(MDD Dual G4 1.25 Ghz, using iMovie 3).
I want to say I've done that with the Cube around the office (boote
Re:4 or 5 bay Firewire case? (Score:2)
Why are you leaving out SCSI? Ultra320 is 3.2 times as fast as Firewire 800.
Re:4 or 5 bay Firewire case? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:4 or 5 bay Firewire case? (Score:2)
Of course with a PC you'll get 10TB these days (Score:1)
We had a bunch of these (well, 3*8-port and 80GB PATA it was back then) as el-cheapo RAID-0 disk servers in 2000. Losing a drive was no biggie, the boxes were part of a HSM solution so the master copy of the data was always on tape, these were just temporary caches.
Sweet. (Score:1)
Re:Sweet. (Score:2)
Today I got to play with a new G5 with two big internal disks and four 160GB firewire 800 external disks. It all lives inside a nice iso-rack so that we can hear ourselves edit video.
And, by the way, according to Avid, the speed of f/w 800 should be just fine--seems true so far.
$299 ? (Score:2)
That's without drives or controller. Just the metal brackets. I'm not a machinist, but that seems pretty damn expensive for just a few small metal plates with threaded holes and screws. I wonder how long it will be before similar items will be on sale on ebay for $50.
Moo hah hah? (Score:2)
-fred