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100mb ethernet vs firewire

shu82

shu82

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 10, 2007
697
5
Rocket City, AL
I am thinking of taking some load off my MDD. I have a powermac g3 300 that just got back, after some loaner duty. I have a sata card and 2 500gb drives hooked up to my mdd which are backed up by an external 1tb drive (I also have 2 250gb drives too). I feel like I am overloading the power supply running 4 drives inside and 3 monitors on it.

The question is: How should I connect the g3 to the g4. Target disk mode or ethernet. If the smurfbox had gigabit this would be a no brainer.
 
Connect by Firewire networking not target disk. It's not gigabit but 400mb is better than 100mb.

edit: You could get this really cheap gigabit card. Though not officially supported it appears to have been recognized by OS X on a reviewers G4. The vendor and device ID's must be in Apples driver set.
 
Mmmmmm, gigabit

And that is cheap enough to go under the wifies radar. Thanks!!!

Now will it work in a g3 under tiger? Hmm to google i go

Edit: It looks like any realtech 8169 chipset card works great!! Even in 10.4

Thanks!
 
You're not "overloading" your MDD... I have three HDDs in a Beige (230W PSU.. or possibly 150W, accounts vary), and your MDD is I think 338W or possibly 360 or 400.

Running multiple monitors doesn't mean anything... they have their own dedicated power source, excepting ADC monitors, of which you can only have one at most anyhow, which is of course just fine.

Believe it or not, HDDs don't draw that much power... RAM can draw more.

So don't worry :)
 
Wait, 100MB or 100Mb?

Megabyte or megabit? There's a difference.

(I already know the answer (mind-taking!), but want to make sure here.)
 
Firefly2002 said:
You're not "overloading" your MDD... I have three HDDs in a Beige (230W PSU.. or possibly 150W, accounts vary), and your MDD is I think 338W or possibly 360 or 400.

Running multiple monitors doesn't mean anything... they have their own dedicated power source, excepting ADC monitors, of which you can only have one at most anyhow, which is of course just fine.

Believe it or not, HDDs don't draw that much power... RAM can draw more.

So don't worry :)
Click to expand...

I just want to be very nice to my old girl. She will turn 6 this year! I have the 400W psu. I have 2 gigs of ram a 15"ACD and 2 20". One is powered by a craptacular rage 128 pci card. Then I have a USB card and the Sata Card. So 3 pci cards, ACD, and 4 hard drives 2 dvd burners. I think I might be asking for it. Those power supplies cost an arm and a leg.

But thanks. Now gigabit cometh, to my overflow smurfbox.
 
I wouldn't worry about getting a gigabit Nic - You'd be at the HDD's throughput limit before you'd max out the standard nic.
 
I thought we would get at least half way to gigabit before the HD limits would kick in. What would be the point of firewire 800 then. 800 vs 100.
 
Modern hard drives will easily outpace the 100Mb/s (12.5MB/s) connection. According to tests that I have read on Tomshardware guide some drive go faster than 50MB/s (400Mb/s) and that outpaces standard firewire one even hit 82MB/s (656Mb/s) a 7200RPM 750GB drive, just look at the average read speed. To keep up with them you need gigabit ethernet, Firewire 800 or SATA/eSATA (same thing really all eSATA is an external port). Now if your drives are a little older they may run in the 30 to 40 MB/s range but that still outpaces the 100Mb/s default ethernet.

To further slow things down there are latencies in the network connection that do not allow for the full bandwidth. Since they are not designed for the same type of data transfer that SATA/ATA are built for.

At the very least create a network with Firewire 400, if not with that Gigabit NIC. I assume you will be tossing those 2x250GB in the G3 if you are transferring data to both simultaneously you will get a severe bottleneck on 100Mb. You can boot the MDD off the SATA card right?

While you are reconfiguring since you have a 1TB backup up drive have you considered; MDD with 2x500GB in RAID 0 and G3 BW 2x250GB in RAID 0:cool:. Then you will get a nice boost in application launch times and large file transfers.

One potential problem with the Gigabit card is the G3's PCI bus may not be quick enough for full Gigabit speed but it should get fairly close.
 
I am about to pull the trigger on a gigabit ethernet card and a usb card together on the marketplace. Actually I am going to do things a little backwards. I am putting the SATA drives in the B/W since the on board ide bus cannot take large drives. I will leave the 2 250's in the MDD since it will take large disks. I'll have them mirrored. Then I have a 1tb external that will be hooked to the 2 500's via usb2 for mirroring in the B/W. We are talking separate power supplies, surge protectors and breakers in the main box.

We have a 3 month old and can't afford to loose our ever increasing iphoto library. I keep buying fresh sd cards for hard copy, and I'm mirroring everything. We can't afford to loose anything. Paranoia is good since we lost a lot of her pictures before the baby was born, when my nephew decided to rest his elbows on her ibook:eek:
 
shu82 said:
I just want to be very nice to my old girl. She will turn 6 this year! I have the 400W psu. I have 2 gigs of ram a 15"ACD and 2 20". One is powered by a craptacular rage 128 pci card. Then I have a USB card and the Sata Card. So 3 pci cards, ACD, and 4 hard drives 2 dvd burners. I think I might be asking for it. Those power supplies cost an arm and a leg.

But thanks. Now gigabit cometh, to my overflow smurfbox.
Click to expand...

Ew. The Rage 128 didn't ship with that.. what'd you pillage it from your Smurf? Lol. Those things are awful :x You'd be better off flashing a Radeon 7000 64 MB card for dual-monitor support and more VRAM (as well as Quartz Extreme support if you use PCI Extreme)

Sounds like a good system otherwise ;)

Nah, you're not asking for it. The Beige has an original Radeon Mac Edition PCI card, USB and ATA/66 card connected to the three internal HDDs (had to kind of jerry-rig the third), with the CD-RW connected to the onboard ATA. There's even an internal fan I had to install so that the PSU's last molex connector would reach the third drive, haha. You're fine, trust me. Unless you're having mysterious restarts, of course.

You might want to consider a FW800 card... I'm not sure if that would end up working out as faster than Gigabit ethernet. I know at one point when 1000BT was new, it would really max out at something like 200Mbps, but I guess it's probably matured since then. Still though, FW800 seems more beneficial/practical.

BTW, velocity... even the older 120 GB seagate I have in this computer is capable of over 50 MB/s... newer drives can reach above 100 MB/s, believe it or not ;)
 
shu82 said:
I am about to pull the trigger on a gigabit ethernet card and a usb card together on the marketplace. Actually I am going to do things a little backwards. I am putting the SATA drives in the B/W since the on board ide bus cannot take large drives. I will leave the 2 250's in the MDD since it will take large disks. I'll have them mirrored. Then I have a 1tb external that will be hooked to the 2 500's via usb2 for mirroring in the B/W. We are talking separate power supplies, surge protectors and breakers in the main box.

We have a 3 month old and can't afford to loose our ever increasing iphoto library. I keep buying fresh sd cards for hard copy, and I'm mirroring everything. We can't afford to loose anything. Paranoia is good since we lost a lot of her pictures before the baby was born, when my nephew decided to rest his elbows on her ibook:eek:
Click to expand...

In that case may I suggest instead of mirroring on the BW G3 do manual backups instead from the 2x500 to the 1TB, or use a backup app manually. That way if you accidentally delete the file it is still on the backup. Unless you are storing photos on a daily basis this manual backup can work well.

Further you could keep the 1TB in a bolted down small fire resistant safe with other info such as deed, birth certificates etc... Because even if you have fifty hard drives all mirroring eachother a thief or fire will still make you lose all. You could also back up to DVD to store in the safe if you want to perform a mirrored RAID on the G3. A dual layer DVD burner can be had for less than $20 and the DL media is quite cheap now.
 
Thats a good idea about the manual backups. I need to look into the fire safe box to put my tapes and sd cards into. I could just leave them at my parents house too until then. They have all my deeds and titles in their safe.

I have a burner in the G4, but I've already gone through the "back up on dvd/cd" stage of my life. It doesn't seem to work that great in the long term. I'll stick to dual hard drives (I still don't trust raid 5), and the original media (sd cards and dv tapes). I wish tape drives had gotten bigger/better at the same speed as our files, I still have all the data from school reports I did almost 20 years ago.

Also, I just bought a gigabit Ethernet card from Waiting4intelmacs!
 
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