Turning an old G4 tower into a firewire drive

[leuvnaut]

I wanted to turn my old G4 tower into an external firewire drive. I figure the firewire 400 on the G4 is just as good as the USB 2.0 connections.

1) Is it possible to format it as one RAID drive? I have several HDs and want to throw all of them into the tower and have one connection and a fan to cool the drives. Even if RAID is not possible it would help with all the clutter of multiple USB cables.

2) How can I make it boot up in Firewire disk mode automatically, ie, without having to hold down T while it boots? Is this something I can set in the BIOS?I want the tower to become a dedicated external HD without the need for a monitor or keyboard.

Thanks for any help and tips.

[Satcomer]

Bios? What is Bios? That is a Windows arcane setup from the 1980s. On the OS X mac just launch system Preference->Startup Disk and select what to automatic boot into.

Using a full size computer as a hard drive? You must be rich to pay the high electricity bill your going to have. You better would be to buy a compatible third party external hard drive enclosure (compatible to the hard drive). Firewire will be the fastest over time.

[ora]

Or turn it in to a fileserver, which is what I did with my sawtooth G4 tower.

Whack in a gigabit ethernet card, which make sit as fast to access the drives as over usb2/firewire, then connect to it from other machiens using apple-K. Once you've set it up the first time, mounting is as quick as apple-k, return, and return again. You can also then access it remotely with VNC (free) or Apple Remote Desktop (paid for), and even run RAID buy getting a raid controller card (though these cost more).

Personally, i use the tiny internal drive in the sawtooth for the system, then the machien runs 3 external drives in a mini rack and dvd burner. It works very well for me. I bought a USB2 card for almost nothing to let me plug all the drives in and that plus a bit more (very cheap) RAM and the machine has a new lease of life.