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Beliblis

macrumors regular
Original poster
Dec 31, 2011
241
11
Hi,

I've got an old PowerMac G5. Beautiful machine – but not worth selling. My main machine these days is a late 2011 MBP.
I'm self-employed in the creative industry and I'll soon move into an office to share with another 2 creatives.

To give the G5 some use in its old days, I thought about using it some sort of server / network machine: buy a few PCI cards for eSATA and USB3 connectivity, some internal 2-4TB hard drives and then use it as a central storage unit and as a print spooler.

Would that make sense? Would it be a good idea to put Mac OS Server onto that machine? Or is that "overkill". (The latest one for the PowerPC would be OS 10.5.8 Server – which sometimes comes up cheaply on eBay).

The most important task for the old G5 would be to use it as RAID storage (2 internal SATA bays) and to run backups. G5 stays in the office, MPB comes with me when I leave the office.

Any thoughts?
 

ytk

macrumors 6502
Jul 8, 2010
252
5
I think you're going to have a hard time finding USB 3 drivers for Leopard. And unless your system has PCIe, you won't find a USB 3 card for it anyway. eSATA is possible, but Firewire 800 is simpler and almost as good in terms of speed. Even if your system only supports Firewire 400, you'll have an easier time adding an 800 card than an eSATA card. Firewire 800 cards usually don't require drivers, but eSATA cards generally do, and they tend to be a bit flaky in my experience. If you're going over a network connection, you won't see much of a difference anyway.

You don't really need Server for what you're doing. It won't hurt, but you're not doing anything that takes advantage of it. Plain old Leopard supports RAID, and file and printer sharing are built in to the OS as well.

If you just want to play around with OS X server for some reason, go nuts (although I think you'll be a bit let down in terms of its capabilities compared to the base OS), but you don't really need it.
 
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