Mac Server G4/500 Tower: What's The Difference?

Splinky · #1 June 6th, 2004, 03:24 AM

My father got a hold of a Mac Server G4/500 Tower. It was used as a server at one point. I am in the process of setting it up for home use. I wiped the drives and did a clean install of Panther. It currently has 2 drives inside. I set one as the operating system and the other as "extra storage". What is the difference between your standard Mac tower and the Mac Server? Can this computer be used for home use (music, internet, video etc.)?
Basically I want to know if I did the right thing to this computer?

**fryke** · #2 June 6th, 2004, 03:25 AM

You'll have no problem using it as a normal desktop machine. The difference was mainly the software it originally came with - and maybe the harddrive configuration/RAM etc.

Splinky · #3 June 6th, 2004, 03:54 AM

Cool. Thanks!
The drive configuration is different. It appers that there are 3 drives inside. I believe 2 of them are linked and act as the main drive 18GB. The third is an 8GB drive which is mounted to the desktop as a seperate drive. This may be a good thing, because when I give it back to my Dad he will be able to use it as storage for video editing. From what I understand, it is good to put your video on a drive seperate from your operating system.

I'm curious. Can this drive be connected to the other 2 and act as a single drive? I guess that would make it a 26GB drive?

Salvo · #4 June 6th, 2004, 05:14 AM

Yes, use the 3rd Drive as a DV Scratch disk.

Although HFS+ handles Fragmentation ridiculously well, it can still get fragmented if you move large files around on it a lot, and if the two RAID Drives get too full (which can happen real quick with DV) they can be a bit tricky to tidy up.
Also although a Striped RAID Array is much quicker than a single Disk Drive, if the tiniest thing goes wrong with either Drive, you could loose everything on the Array. Using the Array for DV would mean that it gets thrashed more, and is more likely to fail.

Using a scratch disk is the ideal solution, since if it gets too thrashed and crashes, you're only going to loose whatever you just pulled off DV tape anyway, which can be pulled back off tape onto a replacement drive. There's a reason it's called a Scratch disk.

The Technology for Striped RAID only applies to two (or Four, or Eight) Drives. I presume MacOS X uses Striped RAID, since the two physical disks appear as one big volume.
So no, you won't be able to Stripe all Three Drives at once.

The other type of RAID is Mirroring, where both Drives store the same information. It isn't as fast as Striping, and means you effectively halve your Data Storage, but does mean that if one Hard Drive goes, the other still contains all the Data.

Randman · #5 June 6th, 2004, 05:25 AM

8GB isn't going to hold much video though.

Randman · #6 June 6th, 2004, 05:27 AM

Quote:

From what I understand, it is good to put your video on a drive seperate from your operating system.

Where did you ever hear that?

My suggestion, if you can, is just format it as one partition and use all of the spaced as needed, but then again, I'm firmly in the non-partition camp, it seems.

Splinky · #7 June 6th, 2004, 03:28 PM

Iv'e heard it from numerous sources. Final Cut pro books mainly.
Your right, 8gb isn't much when it comes to DV video.

**fryke** · #8 June 7th, 2004, 03:12 AM

You could, of course, replace that 8GB harddrive with a bigger one. They're not that expensive. And yes: For video, it's good to have a separate drive, because Mac OS X itself won't write 'between' the video files then.

You'll find attractively priced 80/120 GB drives around, and if they're still too expensive, you might find used 40/60 GB drives that are still much better for video editing than that 8 GB one. ;-)