G3 iBook instead of NAS...?

[RBG79]

OK I'm here to ask a bit of advice.

I'm relatively new to the apple world - been playing on wintel for 15 odd years and made the switch to mac about 10 months ago.

Now what I've got at the moment is one 12" G4 iBook, 1 wireless router (with 1 ethernet port) and 1 external HDD (250gb USB & firewire).

What i want to do is be able to access the files on the external HDD from the laptop without plugging it in all the time... I realise that a 'simple' NAS could support this, however all the NAS that I've seen that support external HDD require you to reformat the drive when installing it (thus wiping data and rendering it useless for travelling).

A solution that I've come up with is to get a refurbished G3 ibook plug it into the router and access the files from here. The added advantage of this being that I could P2P programs on the G3 as well thus freeing up the G4.

Specs for the refurbished mac:

500 MHz PowerPC 750cx (G3) processor with a 256k on-chip level 2 cache, 128 MB RAM 10gb Hard Drive CD ROM USB & Firewire 56K modem 10/100 & Carry case with OS 10.2.x installed​

Anyone have any opinions on this idea?
Or any other ideas on how to do this?

Thanks in advance.
R

 

[giffut]

This ...

... solution is way better than using NAS storage, which tends to be quite slow regarding file transfer speeds. Also you are far more flexible, as you can network any attached device on the ibook.

Basically you run OSX on the ibook, activate file sharing on both (or any networked) computers and then you can mount the external firewire drive on your g4 via the finder "APPLE+K" command (Go To Server) - and vice versa, too.

You need to give the g3 ibook a name and a password, though, in the system preference "sharing".

 

[RBG79]

ko...

any problems you can see with mixing the G3 running 10.2 (ie the one sharing the drive) and a G4 running 10.4?