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Upgrade PPC G4 Mini to Gigabit ethernet, how?

occamsrazor

occamsrazor

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 25, 2007
419
16
Hi,

I have a PowerPC G4 Mac mini 1.42Ghz in use as a file server, amongst other things. I have a 500GB firewire drive attached. It's not the most powerful machine but it does fine.

The only thing that's annoying me is whilst the rest of my networked machines are Gigabit (Quicksilver G4, Windows laptop, NAS Drive), the Mac Mini is only 100MB ethernet, and when moving multi-GB files which I do a lot, it's annoying.

I know about TCP/IP-over-Firewire but that only works to one machine, and you need a separate firewire card to that used for connecting other devices (e.g. hard drives), so that's not really an option for me.

I've seen there's some USB 2.0 to Gigabit adapters on the market with varying degrees of Mac support, but often driver problems too.

Does anyone have a viable solution?

Thanks,

Ben
 
A

Anaxarxes

macrumors 6502
Feb 27, 2008
421
598
Amsterdam, Netherlands
occamsrazor said:
Hi,

I have a PowerPC G4 Mac mini 1.42Ghz in use as a file server, amongst other things. I have a 500GB firewire drive attached. It's not the most powerful machine but it does fine.

The only thing that's annoying me is whilst the rest of my networked machines are Gigabit (Quicksilver G4, Windows laptop, NAS Drive), the Mac Mini is only 100MB ethernet, and when moving multi-GB files which I do a lot, it's annoying.

I know about TCP/IP-over-Firewire but that only works to one machine, and you need a separate firewire card to that used for connecting other devices (e.g. hard drives), so that's not really an option for me.

I've seen there's some USB 2.0 to Gigabit adapters on the market with varying degrees of Mac support, but often driver problems too.

Does anyone have a viable solution?

Thanks,

Ben
Click to expand...

The thing is USB is 480Mbps, where Gigabit Thernetnet is, well 1000Mbps. So you'd have a bottleneck via USB. BUt I guess that is the closest that you can get as you have 100Mbps ethernet now.

http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Product_Id=281799#
 
occamsrazor

occamsrazor

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 25, 2007
419
16
My limited understanding was even with Gigabit you never really get close to the 1000Mbps anyway because of the TCP/IP overhead, but how that would be affected going through a 480Mbps USB link i've no idea. So long as it is significantly faster than the 100 ethernet, that's fine by me.
As for the Belkin I'd read of lots of users having problems with that on Mac OS X despite it's claimed compatibility.
 
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