old notes
tycondrius recently gave me an old G4, which has me revisiting some kind of network storage solution. This led me to dig out some old notes that I never got around to posting for some reason. I figured that I'd get these out of the way before drafting one for the new machine...
HARDWARE LIST
G3/300 beige minitower with 384MB RAM
2GB SSD
D-Link DGE-528T Gigabit PCI ethernet adaptor
SIIG Serial ATA PCI-M
2x Samsung SpinPoint F1 1TB hard drives
Belkin F5U005 - 2-port USB v1 PCI card
OS X INSTALLATION
Booting from the 10.2 CD gave me a grey circle with line through it. I tried booting the machine from a variety of other OS X versions but in the end had to boot into 8.6 (also from CD). It dawned on me that some requirement for OS X must not be met by the setup. Rather than start yanking out RAM at random, as I was already in 8.6, I decided to format the SSD. When I tried booting from the 10.2 CD again, it worked. So old version of OS X (10.0-10.2) seem to need a formatted drive to attempt an install, even though one of the install options is to format the drive. *shrugs*
I installed 10.2, turning off all options except the BSD Subsystem to save space.
Once this was done, I installed the usb pci card. This was recognized by the OS, and my 16GB Kingston USB stick auto-mounted. I had already downloaded the 10.2.8 combo update to the stick on another computer and I installed this directly from the stick.
Add Terminal to the Dock. I used this A LOT to check things along the way. Also, Disk Utility, just to have it handy when formatting drives later.
D-Link DGE-528T
Works using the drivers on the supplied CD. Remember to change the service order if you have more than one NIC cable connected. (To do this, open System Preferences. From the drop down Show menu, select Network Port Configurations, and drag the services into the correct order. My new card showed up as PCI Ethernet Slot 2, which I dragged to the top of the list.)
SIIG Serial ATA PCI-M
Worked out of the box. Samsung 1TB drives recognized straight away.
Also tested as working:
HU-32i - 2-port USB v1.0 PCI card
Tested as not working:
Silicon Image Sil3512 SATA PCI card - 2 int / 2 ext ports
Drive positioning
The G3 minitower has 5 drive bays - 4 front accessible and 1 internal. When considering which drive to mount where, note that the faceplates on the lower 3 front bays are interchangeable, but the one for the top bay is different.
I mounted the two terabyte drives in the top front bays, replacing the floppy drive and one of the existing hard drives. (I moved the internal metal blank from where the old hard drive was located to cover the hole in the floppy drive faceplate.) I put the stock Zip drive in the lower bay and the stock DVD drive in the bay between that and the hard drives. I removed another old hard drive from the internal bay and left that empty for now.
During install, I had the 2GB SSD is on the first ATA chain, the stock DVD drive on the second ATA chain. Afterwards, I added the stock Zip drive to the second ATA chain. Either the G3 or OS X didn't like this very much (it caused trouble with accessing the hard drives) so I disconnected it again.
Sharing
On the G3, open System Preferences, select Sharing. Under the Services tab, check the Personal File Sharing box. Note the address it gives you.
On the client side (my 2008 iMac) from the Go menu in the Finder, select Connect to Server... (cmd-K). Type in the address given on the G3 and connect with the relevant user account. Select the share you want to connect to an hit OK.
I did a quick test with a few large files, a few small files, and my WoW install folder. Throughput hovered around 10MB/s, except when dealing with lots of small files where it fell off.
Power & Sleep
While the G3 will sleep and wake successfully in this configuration, the PSU remains active, which is the loudest component of the system. Wake is almost instant, presumably because it's not deep sleep. OS X spins drives back up selectively, so a drive remains spun down until a file on the particular drive is required.
I set the G3 to never sleep or turn off the monitor (because the monitor will be physically off most of the time), but allowed it to spin down the hard drives. (These settings are in the Energy Saver section of System Preferences.)
Tests
A sustained write to the share maxes out about 10MB/s, whereas a sustained read approached 11MB/s. Not lightning fast, so there must be a bottleneck somewhere.
Stuff to try:
swap to onboard NIC
try 100baseT NIC
stripe RAID 2x1TB and repeat above
Unfortunately, I couldn't enable jumbo frames on the D-Link. Searching online, I see that the card is listed a supporting frames up to 7k. There's no option in 10.2 through the GUI that I'm aware of, and trying
sudo ifconfig eth1 mtu 9000
at the command line gives an error. It accepts 1500, but nothing greater. Possibly a limitation of the card's driver for 10.2.
http://onemansjourneyintolinux.blogspot.com/2009/02/supersize-me.html
REFERENCES
OSX Notes for Beige G3 Systems
http://resale.headgap.com/osxnotes.html
Mac OS X 10.2: How to Set the MTU Value During Startup
http://support.apple.com/kb/TA21212?viewlocale=en_US
Rsync
http://www.egg-tech.com/mac_backup/
(From what I've read, this is probably a bad idea pre-10.4 when Apple sorted out extended file attribute handling in a custom version of rsync.)
HARDWARE LIST
G3/300 beige minitower with 384MB RAM
2GB SSD
D-Link DGE-528T Gigabit PCI ethernet adaptor
SIIG Serial ATA PCI-M
2x Samsung SpinPoint F1 1TB hard drives
Belkin F5U005 - 2-port USB v1 PCI card
OS X INSTALLATION
Booting from the 10.2 CD gave me a grey circle with line through it. I tried booting the machine from a variety of other OS X versions but in the end had to boot into 8.6 (also from CD). It dawned on me that some requirement for OS X must not be met by the setup. Rather than start yanking out RAM at random, as I was already in 8.6, I decided to format the SSD. When I tried booting from the 10.2 CD again, it worked. So old version of OS X (10.0-10.2) seem to need a formatted drive to attempt an install, even though one of the install options is to format the drive. *shrugs*
I installed 10.2, turning off all options except the BSD Subsystem to save space.
Once this was done, I installed the usb pci card. This was recognized by the OS, and my 16GB Kingston USB stick auto-mounted. I had already downloaded the 10.2.8 combo update to the stick on another computer and I installed this directly from the stick.
Add Terminal to the Dock. I used this A LOT to check things along the way. Also, Disk Utility, just to have it handy when formatting drives later.
D-Link DGE-528T
Works using the drivers on the supplied CD. Remember to change the service order if you have more than one NIC cable connected. (To do this, open System Preferences. From the drop down Show menu, select Network Port Configurations, and drag the services into the correct order. My new card showed up as PCI Ethernet Slot 2, which I dragged to the top of the list.)
SIIG Serial ATA PCI-M
Worked out of the box. Samsung 1TB drives recognized straight away.
Also tested as working:
HU-32i - 2-port USB v1.0 PCI card
Tested as not working:
Silicon Image Sil3512 SATA PCI card - 2 int / 2 ext ports
Drive positioning
The G3 minitower has 5 drive bays - 4 front accessible and 1 internal. When considering which drive to mount where, note that the faceplates on the lower 3 front bays are interchangeable, but the one for the top bay is different.
I mounted the two terabyte drives in the top front bays, replacing the floppy drive and one of the existing hard drives. (I moved the internal metal blank from where the old hard drive was located to cover the hole in the floppy drive faceplate.) I put the stock Zip drive in the lower bay and the stock DVD drive in the bay between that and the hard drives. I removed another old hard drive from the internal bay and left that empty for now.
During install, I had the 2GB SSD is on the first ATA chain, the stock DVD drive on the second ATA chain. Afterwards, I added the stock Zip drive to the second ATA chain. Either the G3 or OS X didn't like this very much (it caused trouble with accessing the hard drives) so I disconnected it again.
Sharing
On the G3, open System Preferences, select Sharing. Under the Services tab, check the Personal File Sharing box. Note the address it gives you.
On the client side (my 2008 iMac) from the Go menu in the Finder, select Connect to Server... (cmd-K). Type in the address given on the G3 and connect with the relevant user account. Select the share you want to connect to an hit OK.
I did a quick test with a few large files, a few small files, and my WoW install folder. Throughput hovered around 10MB/s, except when dealing with lots of small files where it fell off.
Power & Sleep
While the G3 will sleep and wake successfully in this configuration, the PSU remains active, which is the loudest component of the system. Wake is almost instant, presumably because it's not deep sleep. OS X spins drives back up selectively, so a drive remains spun down until a file on the particular drive is required.
I set the G3 to never sleep or turn off the monitor (because the monitor will be physically off most of the time), but allowed it to spin down the hard drives. (These settings are in the Energy Saver section of System Preferences.)
Tests
A sustained write to the share maxes out about 10MB/s, whereas a sustained read approached 11MB/s. Not lightning fast, so there must be a bottleneck somewhere.
Stuff to try:
swap to onboard NIC
try 100baseT NIC
stripe RAID 2x1TB and repeat above
Unfortunately, I couldn't enable jumbo frames on the D-Link. Searching online, I see that the card is listed a supporting frames up to 7k. There's no option in 10.2 through the GUI that I'm aware of, and trying
sudo ifconfig eth1 mtu 9000
at the command line gives an error. It accepts 1500, but nothing greater. Possibly a limitation of the card's driver for 10.2.
http://onemansjourneyintolinux.blogspot.com/2009/02/supersize-me.html
REFERENCES
OSX Notes for Beige G3 Systems
http://resale.headgap.com/osxnotes.html
Mac OS X 10.2: How to Set the MTU Value During Startup
http://support.apple.com/kb/TA21212?viewlocale=en_US
Rsync
http://www.egg-tech.com/mac_backup/
(From what I've read, this is probably a bad idea pre-10.4 when Apple sorted out extended file attribute handling in a custom version of rsync.)