Help Me Turn a G5 into a NAS RAID

[Iritscen]

I forgot to say, Please! There's good karma in it for you.

I was planning to buy a NAS RAID device to serve my media, but suddenly I realized, I have a G5 sitting right here next to my current Mac (see sig), and it's still working great. Furthermore, it's got two drive bays and a blazing system architecture compared to my MBP. It's a 1.6GHz (single CPU, of course), running OS X 10.4.6 with 1.5GB of RAM and an 80GB HD, and 10/100/1000 Ethernet, and just dying to have something to do other than serve as a testing ground for PPC apps every week or two. It's got its own monitor, too. I am out of space between my internal HD and my external drive that supplements it, and I want to move all my media off the internal HD to a redundant external storage space.

Of course, while the G5 has a lot of potential, it's an incomplete puzzle, and this is where I could use some help, because I'm a networking newbie even though I'm a long-time Mac user.

1. I never got AirPort for it because it wasn't needed. Now it would be nice, but still not necessary, to serve wirelessly. What kind of AirPort Extreme can it support? My perusal of the Apple Store indicates that 802.11g is the limit, in other words, I can't do -n. Is that true? Also, which is faster in the real world, 802.11g (if I can't do -n) or Ethernet? Also, would I just be buying the PCI card, or are you supposed to get the Base Station too?

2. Should I upgrade it to 10.5, or just update to 10.4.(whatever's last)? I mean, is there an advantage for networking purposes? Otherwise I'm happy sticking with 10.4.x on the G5.

3. I need to set the drives I'll be installing in the two bays as a RAID, but with what, now? Third-party software? Something built-in? I know Leopard has a RAID Utility. Seems that 10.4 doesn't... is this something I have to upgrade to 10.5 to use, or can I just copy the utility to the G5?

4. In order to carry over the current HD's data (if I indeed decide to do that), would I install one SATA drive in the 2nd bay, and then copy the first drive to that drive, then replace the first, 80GB drive with the new drive that has its data, and install the second SATA drive in the 2nd bay? How exactly would I copy the first drive to the second so that it's bootable and all that?

Many thanks for whoever can answer at least one question. Also, if you know of some reason why the whole idea of making the G5 a NAS RAID is not a good one, feel free to say so.

[Lt Major Burns]

i'm in a similar situation. i'm planning on replacing my dual 1.8 g5 with a mbp+a NAS solution for the amount of media i have. i'm leaning against the G5 as a NAS purely on terms of efficiency. G5's run hot and drain a lot of power from the grid. the sooner ican get rid of this thing, the better i'll sleep at night i reckon.

10.4's disk utility can do RAID can't it? when you have a fresh drive? i'm on 10.5 now so can't verify...

802.11g is the upper limit on aftermarket-fitted parts. draft-n is only available on new macs built in (it's part of the newer intel chipsets). for G you will need an airport extreme card (£30ish), and a wireless-g router of any kind. 802.11g has a thoeretical maximum of 54Mb/s, where normal modern ethernet is 100Mb/s theoretical, i would recommend about a 2x speed gain on ethernet. as a media streaming device though, i've found that i can stream ~1500kb/s h.264 SD video quite happily across a wireless-g network. unless you need something much more intensive, i'd be happy with wireless.

10.5 plays a lot nicer with networks. makes tiger feel like a chore in comparison. other computers appear like drives in Finder, which are almost instantly browsable, no having to physically find and mount each network connected computer and drives as in tiger...

bootable clones of any hard drives can be made using either the freeware (but basic) Carbon Copy Cloner, or the shareware (but much nicer) SuperDuper! (trial version clones just fine, and is bootable).

[Iritscen]

It's true, I didn't think of the power consumption. There are some attractive RAID/NAS options like the Drobo, the LaCie 2big, and the Synology DS107+. Also, I wanted hot-swappable drives, and the G5 is anything but hot-swappable. The Drobo and LaCie are.

[Iritscen]

Okay, just to wrap up this story, I went with the LaCie 2big. I just decided that I needed a fast RAID more than a NAS RAID, so I went with the Triple Interface 2big, not the Ethernet one. I ruled out the G5 because of power consumption and needing to keep a big computer running continuously versus a small RAID. I ruled out the Synology because it's NAS but not a RAID, and I ruled out the Drobo because of the scary problems that can crop up, and the non-standard RAID-type setup that means only Data Robotics products can continue to use the redundant disks as you move into the future.

[Satcomer]

Well you could have went with the ReadyNas. You check out the TUAW video on it.