G5 internal Hardrive expansion - cheap vs. expensive solutions
Tim send me an email yesterday with a link to a product that expanses your G5 with two more additional internal HDs. Well I need to state that I always thought that the dual G5 under my table is a perfect machine EXCEPT for the two lonely drive bays and NO other way to install more harddrives. The problem is – as a poweruser – you want a dedicated startup drive with your apps on it (at least that is what I want). It does not need to be the fastes drive in the world but should be large enough to hold your system, apps and day to day stuff. Now there is a "professional" solution to this problem from wiebetech. And let me say is that an "ugly" solution. It lets you expand your G5 with two more drives, serial ATA. So that far its great, but it does so by gluing some stupid looking drive bay on the door (that you are supposed to just take away when something goes awkward during a production). Then you have the hds hanging on their cables attached to the computers on one side and to the door on the other. Very ugly to repeat that. But this would all not be so bad, you know solution like this tend to be messy. But you know what they charge for thing? $1.499 for the 640 GB solution and - hold your breath - $2.499,95 for the 1 Terrabyte solution. I hope they have looked at apples website lately because add hundert grand to that and you get a whole new G5, bright and shiny inside out – as it should look like.
Now for the headline. There is a cheap solution for those brave out there. Some time ago, shortly after the introduction of the G5 the mac news rumor now not rumor anymore site MacBidouille posted a very short article about an G5 owner that has managed to squeeze HD on top of his optical drive and then use a new IDE cable with two ends in replacement for the one that connects to the DVD-R drive and a powercable split. The site promised to do a follow up on the story but never did. Me a little nervous about the heat problem this might have and stability and all set out to find the guy that was mentioned on the site. And I found Mr. Jefftrep from Quebec Canada and had a little email exchange with him. After two month in operation all is fine with his G5 that now sports 2x 250GB Serial ATA Raid and a bootable 160 GB Maxtor normal IDE/ATA drive, no heat problems and no failures, very stable and very fast.
he wrote:
Well... Yes it's me, and NO there is no problems at all. Nothing, no glitch, no heathing, no nothing! And I can say I use my machine full time. I edit on it everyday using FCP4 or making DVD with DVDSP2 (and yes they are legits software). The DVDburner don't even know there's someone else on the ATA chain. ---- The ATA boot drive is a 160 GB Maxtor ATA/133 with 8MB Buffer 7200RPM, so even if the bus speed is higher - i'm stuck with ATA133. My 2 SATA drive are both 250GB Maxtor 7200RPM that Apple installed when I order my G5. They are in RAID0 via Apple diskutility ... ... I'm not sure about the ATA speed, but I can tell you that it boot really faster (like 15 -20 sec) than a G4/Dual1.4Gig with the same kind of configuration ...
So this will be my way around the problem and wiebetech and keep their $2.500 junk piece and put it on the moon.