[X4U] OT: using old tower Mac as a Firewire case?

[Randy B.Singer]

Neil said:

>Well, that case only holds one drive.  Six of those cases would cost $168
>plus shipping. 
...
>Maybe the old Macs are a little slow now and the FW a little flaky, but it
>can still make sense if you are on a budget and have an old G4 with gigabit
>Ethernet lying around.

The original poster is looking to purchase an old Mac to do his bidding, 
not use an old one lying around.  An old used Sawtooth is going to cost 
him around $200. e.g.:

http://www.baucomcomputers.com/

I'm sure that it would work for a couple of hard drives, but it would be 
a definite kludge, using FireWire Transfer Disk mode won't be entirely 
seamless.  

Also, his plan of putting hard drives in the Zip drive bay and the CD-ROM 
drive bay isn't a good one.  Apple specifically recommends against doing 
this:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58200

Both of those bays lack a cooling fan, and the IDE bus for those bays is 
slower than the bus for the internal hard drives.  He'd be looking at the 
cost of an old Sawtooth, plus the cost of two additional IDE PCI cards, 
plus a couple of fans (if he can find some space in the case to mount 
them so that they would do the job).  In the end, using an old Sawtooth 
might end up costing hundreds more than using brand new FireWire case 
kits.

It was a cool idea, but in the end probably not the best way to go.


Randy B. Singer

Co-Author of:
The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th and 6th editions)

OS X Routine Maintenance
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html