can i use my G4 tower as a server? HDs?

[antonioconte]

I'm thinking of using my old G4 tower as server for my small design studio.

I'm not experienced with regard to hard drives for it, but I'd like to put a terrabite hd in it, is this possible? And, would I have to be running OS X so as to connect our other machines to it?

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

There is no such thing as a 3.5" hard drive that has one terabyte of capacity. The largest hard drives are around 500GB, so in order to reach a terabyte of capacity, you'd need to set up a RAID using multiple large hard drives.

I would recommend getting a Sonnet Tempo ATA/133 RAID card, and three or four inexpensive Western Digital 250GB special-edition drives. Use one 250GB drive as a boot drive for Mac OS X Server, then use the remaining drives as a mirrored or striped array.

You can use Linux, but I would recommend running straight Mac OS X or Mac OS X Server to eliminate incompatibilities between the different versions of network protocols (AFP, SMB, etc.).

If you could elaborate a little more on what you're looking for in a server (as servers vary like the colors of the rainbow in terms of what they do and what services they provide), perhaps we could be more specific in our guideance. Do you want file sharing? Server-managed user accounts? Internet access/filtering? Print services? FTP? Hosting a website?

 

[barhar]

'Can i use my G4 tower as a server?' - yes.
'HDs?' ? ... '... I'd like to put a terrabite hd in it, is this possible?' - the PowerMac G4 model will determine the maximum hard disk drive size it is capable of accessing.
If using the ATA bus supplied by Apple Computer, any PowerMac G4 with a bus speed less than 133 MHz can only access hard disk drives with up to 128 GB of storage space. One could install a PCI to SCSI or PCI to ATA card(s), capable of supporting greater than 130 GB hdds.

'... would I have to be running OS X so as to connect our other machines to it?' - most likely, yes. Perhaps even MacOS X 10.3.x or 10.4.x Server.