well, it has been a few days since i have told my little story. i think i have finally
picked out a case. You can see a
simular on on newegg. (the difference is the one on newegg has an external scsi connector.)
velocityg4 - i don't think i am going to do a cpu upgrade, although i am puttiing in 1536MB of ram which should help. I don't know if the cpu upgrade will really benifit me. I have no idea if the pci bus is going to cause a bottleneck. I am cuppling this with 2 highpoint rocketraid 2220 cards. they can do raid5 across 8 drives. you can also link two of them togeather to do the raid5 on up to a 16 drives.
(long exhale... here comes the story)
initally, i purchased a norco ds-1220 and even though it says it will work on a mac, i ran into all sorts of problems using it. (it is quite the story, let me know if you are interested in hearing that one.) from that point, i have been looking at all sorts of solutions (xraid, prebuit nas appliance, or a custom built NAS freenas using naslite, unraid and even an opensolaris nas so i could do xfs which ikeep teetering back and forth on - xfs sounds really cool).
I even though about buying a atx case with 11 5.25 bays and putting all the drives in those using swapable enclosures. then run sata cables to the mac. i really don't want to do this though as it would require 2 cases (the atx one would be less 25% utilized) and require twice the power use. really you wouldn't believe all the ideas i have thought about trying to make this work.
but the big problem that i keep coming back to is from the sata drives. i am WELL beyond the return period on them and everything seems to be able to run a lot better has i just gotten ata drives. and it doesn't seem like i am going to gain very much by using sata... oh well live and learn.
So here is the dilemna: and opensolaris xfs array or run it on mac. I am not a genius using the terminal.... probably more like advanced novice. nut i know how to learn so i am not scared. but i keep thinking that in the long run i am going to wish that it had been on a mac server. thus my desire to integrate this all into a g4.
i keep thinking that the new version of OSX server will really make me glad that i am doing this on a mac, especially since apple is thinking about incorporating zfs support into the os.
adamfilip - i too think that the g4 case looks a lot better then most pc cases. I am not into the modded pc look. i really want something to look very clean. obviously, the case i linked to in this post is anything but clean. but the functionality and ability to hotswap is more important.
honestly, i can't think of a logical way.... or even one dealing in my fantasies that could accomidate the number of hard drives i want to put into this project and incorporate them into a g4 case. dual 533 g4 that has 4 sata 320gb hard drives in a raid5 array and there isn't a lot of space left in that case. i can't imagine fitting 8 more drives into it. have a if you, or anyone else, has any ideas i am all ears.
I am still not sold on the overhaul job i am undertaking. it is a lot of work, that is somewhat risky. Ultimately, i want something stable that will a part of our small... very small companies backup system (along with an iomega rev drive and dvd+r dl disks).
So that is where i am. I have 13 sata drives (one is for drive failure) and the dual 800 g4... and i am just not sure which way i am going to go. And the worst part is i am running out of time to get this done.