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| Son of FrankenMac |
| Written by Doug Birling | |||||||||||||||||
| Friday, 01 September 2006 | |||||||||||||||||
More then two years ago, using information I found on xlr8yourmac.com,
I built a couple of Mac Servers using old 350MHz G3's as a basis. I
found two matching 14 drive towers on the net, mounted the logicboards
inside, purchased a few Sonnet PCI IDE adapter cards and started
adding hard drives. This winter, after adding the 12th drive (including
1 CD drive) to our primary server, I made the decision to begin
researching a new server. One of my goals during the process was to upgrade my current machine, a
Power Mac G4 867MHz "Quicksilver", to a new G5. And after doing a cost analysis, I again found that building a server would still be cheaper compared
to other servers like the XServe. First, I started looking for cases. I knew I wanted at least 14 bays, if not more. After a great deal of searching, I decided on a case from caseoutlet.com. They had a 20 drive case that seemed like it would work great. The next problem was controlling all those drives. If I were to go the IDE 133 route, I could have added up to four cards (16 drives), plus the two internal IDE channels would have given me 4 more drives, totaling 20 drives. However, I was hoping for faster/newer components and decided to look into SATA. I looked to Sonnet as they had served me well in the past, but their only SATA product has two connectors (hopefully they will come out with a 4 channel card in the future), which would max the server at 8 drives (plus 4 drives max on the built in IDE channels). While 12 drives were okay, my goal was to be able to fill the case. After further searching, I came across 3ware's Escalade 9500 8 Port Serial ATA RAID Controller card. 8 channels, two cards and one 2 channel from Sonnet would put me at may goal, but... they currently don't support the Mac. So my searched continued until one afternoon while checking the headlines at macsurfer.com, I read about a 1200Mb files transfer speeds in a G5/G4. Intrigued, I checked out the story and there I found my answer. The new RocketRAID 1820A from HighPoint Technologies. In the last month, they added support for G4/G5 computers running 10.2+. I immediately searched them out on the web, and fired off a few questions. After getting the answers I was looking for, it seemed like most of the key pieces were in place.   As luck would have it, this summer one of the drives on our older servers died and all we had was an incomplete tape backup. When I had built those servers, none of the drives were configured as a RAID. I was trying to not spend a lot of money, but after having a drive die, I knew this new server had to be better prepared. So, before I was finished installing everything, I had ordered 2 more drives for RAID purposes. The first step after getting all the parts was removing the G4's components. Out came the power supply, the drives, the video card, memory and finally the logicboard. The hardest part of the build up was mounting the logicboard. As with my previous to buildups, I needed to drill holes where the Mac board mounted and use risers to offset the board from the base. I did find one hole that matched up from a standard ATX board. See, Macs and PCs aren't that different :-).
  
I then had to work on the next major task, the power supply.
Unfortunately, the new G4s don't use a standard power supply connector (i.e. you can't just plug in an ATX supply, click here
for a summary). So, after much debating, I decided to lengthen the wires on the existing
supply. I had to add 24" extra to each wire in the logicboard power
supply. A word of caution. If you ever set out to do something similar,
either mark off which wires are what, or only work on one at a time, as
mixing them up will have disastrous results. I choose to go the one at
a time route, and 4 hours later had an extra 24" on my power supply.
I mounted the primary startup drive and optical drive, connected
them up, installed my power supply and fired up the computer. Same old
grey apple, but in a much bigger case.
  
I wiped the startup drive and
installed a fresh copy of Panther. I then installed the Highpoint Card, the necessary software and connected two hard drives. I rebooted and when the
finder appeared, I got the message that two drives needed to be
formated. I formated the two as separate drives at first and did a few
network tests.
Since our servers are used to archive, one of my primary concerns is write speed. I copied 1.24 gigs of files from a G5 on our network to the drive, and it took 2 min and 4 sec, during several attempts. Not bad, but not blazingly fast either. So next I fired up disk utility and reformatted the two as a Striped Array. This time, I thought I should see some really impressive results, so I started my copy and it only took 2 min and 4... hey wait a second! The time should have decreased right? We have a 10/100Mb switch at our office and, as I found out, I was pretty much maxing it out. When you calculate out those transfer rates, you get about 80MB/sec. I would like to see more from our network, but after several more tests, that was the best I got. I then added the remaining two drives and and again configured a Striped RAID (over 4 drives), this time through RAIDman, highpoints configuration software for the card. After connecting the server to the G5 directly (The Quicksilver and the G5 both have a 1000Mb ethernet ports, another reason for wanting to use a Quicksilver) I again repeated the test. This time the test folder was slightly larger at 1.25 gigs. The results this time were much more impressive. The transfer took 30 seconds (repeated twice). I then tried duplicating the folder on the drive and found it took 15 seconds to duplicate the entire 1.25 gig folder, which for those of you keeping score at home comes out to 666 mb/sec. Much better... But, like I said, my goal was not only speed but also data security. So I fired up RAIDman once more and this time created a RAID 10 volume, both stripped and mirrored. This sort of drive can survive the loss of one of the drives and still maintain data integrity, although at a crippled state. See RAID 10 info. If a drive does fail, a new drive is swapped in and RAIDman will rebuild the RAID. Much better then trying to retrieve about 600 gigs off our tape backup! So how much speed did I miss after switching to the RAID 10 setup? The same 1.25 gig folder took 40 seconds to copy, only ten seconds more, and the duplicate folder test took 20 seconds, I can live with those numbers, especially when our network, for the time being will be the bottleneck.
Overall, the physical buildup of the server took just over 24 man hours. The RAID set up was fast, about an hour, although the testing took some time. I have since configured the shares on the server, and set up our normal groups and users. I look forward to many days with little trouble as our new server does it's new job.
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