Martin’s Weblog

Power Mac G4 reloaded

Well, this is my first post for quite some time. I’ve been busy with other things (getting a life and stuff like that…). But therefore this post will be a large one.

A new project to replace my desktop clutter…

To be honest I’m really getting tired of this WD MyBook Pro II 1TB I bought back in December ‘06. I sold my Seagate 300 GB Disk and now the WD is already full in less than two months. Some time ago WD came up with a MyBook NAS appliance but I am sure it sucks as much as the 1TB Firewire Drive.

I mean let’s be serious: what is a TB of data any more these days? yes I agree – It’s nothing. and I had to do something about it because external Drives are not flexible enough:

I recently had the chance to obtain a sorted out Powermac G4 Gigabit Ethernet (including a Mac OS X Tiger license) for free from an Advertising Agency. It is nearly seven years old (Steve Jobs: “Four Gigaflops! The new G4 is screaming fast!”–>yeah, alright…) but this baby can still do a lot more than any MyBook Pro Disk and Buffalo TeraStation combined. So let’s do the Math (It is really easy):

An old PowerMac G4…

… a couple of 750 GB Drives (+two Samsung 500s) …

… a Sonnet Tempo 4+4 SATA Card …

… renders the WD MyBook useless. Period.

Unfortunately the G4’s power supply broke a week after I got the machine so the first thing I had to do was to get a decent Power supply for all the disk drives this baby was going to house. The original Apple Power supply was too weak anyway. It says the 12 V outlet has 8 A max. That means all Hard Drives + fans are allowed to consume 96 Watt total. A Hard drive typically consumes 2,4 A during spinup (and around 10-12 Watt when it is running) so with a lot of drives installed I’d have wasted the power supply anyway. The Problem with Apples power supplies is they’re not ATX standard compliant. I’m not much the soldering guy so I googled and found this web site www.macnetzteil.de where I purchased a 400W power supply including G4 (Gigabit Ethernet) adaptor for 90 EUR. These cables are patent pending. An original Apple power supply would have been at least twice as expensive. 90 Euros was for the whole kit; that means everything you need to install it is included.

The G4 has to run 24/7 so another important point is power consumption. The storage disks only spin up wenn they’re needed and the regular power this machine takes is around 40-50 Watts with one Drive running. The Mac is mainly used for backup and download purposes as well as remote logins so the additional drives won’t spin up very often. The Sonnet Tempo 4+4 SATA card allows me to connect up to eight SATA hard drives to the G4. That is a nice bunch of disks for a home server and certainly more flexible than a NAS you can buy off the shelf.

I know this is a really old machine without lots of muscle but in terms of power costs it beats every G5 and Mac Pro which both consume 160 Watt (!) when they’re idle and only one drive spinning. And besides I don’t need that much computing power. The G4 can also house a lot of drives in a pretty small enclosure: 4 Drives on the bottom and an additional two next to the power supply (4 with an additional adaptor).

To administrate the G4 you can always use ssh and Apple remote desktop. Once set up the services are launched everytime I boot the G4. But I really recommend a vnc client since it’s free. ARD is quite pricy for home users like me. AFP and ftp are running but you need to do some command line hacking to set up nfs which is off by default. There are tons of tutorials on the web or try macosxhints.com

I bought a bunch of 500 Gig hard drives and later two Seagate 750 to accomodate my data and finally installed OS X 10.4 Tiger using an old 10 Gig Drive as fake CD image. The original DVD ROM Drive was broken and I didn’t intend to install it anyway.

On the downside Mac OS X doesn’t support RAID level 5 but rumor has it Apple is coming up with something way better called zfs (Zettabyte File System) which is a new file system developed by Sun employing so-called storage pools to manage large amounts of data with ease. That is exactly what I need. Actually use of zfs in Leopard is is confirmed and already made it into Leopard builds in december 06 but apparently it isn’t working yet. Mac OS X 10.5 will also have built-in RAID functionality called RAID-Z which delivers much-needed redundancy similar to RAID 5 but without the downside of the “RAID 5 write hole”. For now I’ll stick with independant disks but I’m hoping to switch to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard as soon as it comes out to be able to use RAID-Z. Well I guess I have to wait till october. Honestly I’m totally cool with Leopard’s delay because for RAID Z I’d like to get a couple of Hitachi’s new 1TB disks which are undeliverable until July.

Usage and advantages:
The G4 performs well and I can mount my Volumes via AFP and NFS using 802.11g and even stream HD (720p) content without any Problems.
Here’s a nice tutorial on how to set up NFS on Mac OS X.
The Wireless Base station is one floor beneath me separated by a concrete ceiling. There is certainly no need for an AppleTV. It is rather limited and doesn’t play the video formats consumers really want. I have no problem with connecting my MBP to the LCD TV once in a while.
Playing movies over a wireless network can be very slow but I use MPlayer and VLC for playback which both have variable Cache sizes. You can adjust them in the Player’s preferences. Both apps are not limited like Quicktime but play all sorts of Codecs found on the internet. And best of all: they’re free. Look how smooth the 720p video is!
On the video you can also see the MenuMeters data rate counter which goes from 500KB/sec in slow scenes to 1,5 MB/sec in scenes with a lot of motion.

http://www.mechriki.de/media/rat.mp4 [h.264, 1,7MB]
Right-click to save the video to your disk.

The Video is a screen capture with a bandwidth counter in the menu bar. The 720p trailer comes from the G4 file server downstairs. No tricks. VLC does an excellent job caching the video where Quicktime Player miserably failed.

Important: The high processor utilization comes from the capture software. During normal HD videoplayback it is around 40% on both cores.

I have yet to buy a 802.11n Base station and I will *not* buy Apple’s new Airport n but go for a German model which will be released by the end of March. The predecessor which I own has proven to be *very* reliable compared to any other wireless router I used before. It has a lot of features like integrated DSL modem, SIP conformity etc and runs on Linux. For now I stick to my old “Fritz!Box 7170″ which gives me up to 2,9 MB/sec over 802.11g. That speed is totally acceptable.

People often complain they need Gigabit speeds at home but I say you don’t because with this configuration you’ll never have to transfer large files any more just to watch a movie or listen to music. Apropos Music: I use iTunes on the G4 to share my Music collection to the home network and everyone can connect to it via iTunes. This is simple and works like a charm. Once the media is transferred or downloaded directly to the G4, it always resides on the server and I get (in terms of stream) them to my MBP “on demand” via 802.11g /and later n). The only time I transfer large amounts of data is when moving the WD to the G4 or copying one of my DVDs. Average throughput is 20 MB/sec so this takes around 14 hrs.

I don’t have my desk cluttered with all these Firewire Drive Cases any more when I want to access my data.

Finally, I put the G4 into a cupboard. It is very unobtrusive and one can’t see what’s inside. Everything is running very smoothly and the only thing for me to do is wait for Leopard.

Concluding I can say this box can do a lot more than any NAS Appliance and Firewire Hard Drive. I have my own file server at home, a box that is always online can run any app and I can connect to it to transfer my files from and to with my MacBook Pro.

The WD MyBook Pro II “stays in the trash”. No, seriously the WD MyBook is for sale now. Price is 330 EUROs and can be purchased through PayPal. Shipping to the following Countries in Europe via Air mail is included in the price: Belgium, Danmark, Finland, France, Greece, Great Britain (incl.Isle of Man), Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Slowak Republic, Spain, Czech Republic.

If noone has interest I’m gonna sell through ebay. But I’m curious and I’ll wait a little bit.

Apple TV sucks

And here’s why:
Users are basically limited to iTunes Music store content. What about the other formats around the net such as xvid, mkv-hd, real video, divx, ogg vorbis, FLAC and so on. I have a HD TV but there’s no way I’ll ever gonna buy an Apple TV unless they let it play the audio and video formats consumers really want. And that’s just about it.
Apple TV is acomputer at heart. That means it should be able to access content via nfs, ftp, afp or smb. But this is just poor. One cannot use existing NAS devices or even hook up an external Hard drive via the built in USB port.
Am I the only one who has complaints like this?? I’m feeling Apple didn’t take consumers’ wishes into consideration when developing this device.

Word, yo!

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