Ideal Configuration for G5 FM9 Server

[vladisglad]

Hi guys,

I am looking to set up a Quad 2.5 G5 Tower as a server for about 35 clients. I am trying to find out what is the best way to squeeze out as much performance as possible.

1) I heard that fast drives (10,000 or 15,000 RPM) make tremendous difference. I can't find any external FW800 or SCSI RAID with these kind of hard drives. At least ones that are not server racks.

2) Does it seem like a good idea to get two 15,000 RPM drives and use OS X mirror option and run the operating software and the files off those drives, or should I really look for some kind of an external solution?

3) If I go external am I better off using latest SCSI format or FW800.

Answers and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

[Reed]

The best performance and reliability I've found with my G5 while using internal drives is to use one of the G5 mounting kits allowing an additional 3 drives (total of 5) to be installed in the G5 tower. I purchased this along with 4 500GB Enterprise class SATA drives (7200 rpm drives were chosen, since I was told that 10,000 rpm drives would generate too much heat for the mounting kit. Here is one such mounting kit:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Sonnet%20Technology/ENCG53HD/

The drives are connected to a PCI express SATA adapter, and configured via apple software RAID into an array of 4 disks where two 2-disk RAID 0 stripes are mirrored. This gave much better performance than just mirroring, and neither of the RAID 5 capable hardware RAID cards I tried worked properly.

So the boot drive (single 10,000 RPM SATA) is connected to the on board controller, and the other 4 in the RAID are on the card.

All of the external solutions I looked at were much more expensive, but if you're going to go all out, get an Xserve RAID.

[vladisglad]

Thank you very much for your reply.

I've heard about this type of rig to cram more drives into a G5. I am hesitant to go that far myself because I always felt like it's a bad idea to mess with the internal structure of the G5, especially for the very late models that generate enormous amount of heat as it is. In addition to that, I haven't seen any benchmark results but supposedly software raid that apple provides is less efficient than an array running through a hardware processor. I just want RAID 5 parity through an independent enclosure.

I don't really want to spend thousands either, if money wasn't an issue I'd get a rack with 15,000 RPM SCSI drives

Here is what I'm thinking. Getting a 4 drive enclosure such as this:

http://store.sansdigital-shop.com/tr4m.html

And packing with 4 SATA 2 10,000 RPM drives. Many enclosures of that type have eSata interface to the server and I don't if it will be a bottleneck in the event that I get those fast sata drives in it.

[Steven H. Blackwell]

I would recommend that you do not use SATA drives. Use SCSI or SAS instead.

Steven