Hello, gopherspace!
Today I did some Bongusta maintenance, added few fresh new phlogs,
buried the dead, so this may be a good opportunity to phlog something
myself.
After I decided to retire my PowerMac G5, it was inevitable to move
somewhere all the data from its two disk drives. As I mentioned in
January post "On hostnames, my computers in 2017 and change plans"
[1], I built for this matter a fileserver from some ancient spare
parts I found in my hardware shelf. Unfortunately the old hardware
started to fail after three months of daily usage. No surprise - I had
the board eight years and even back in 2010 I've got it for free,
because it was considered so old, that the owner didn't have the
courage to want actual money for it. It served me well, but hardware
simply isn't immortal.
However I didn't want to have a G5 and a dead fileserver under my desk
forever, so the fileserver was brought back to life in first half of
May. I've got a socket 775 motherboard, Intel E5300 CPU and 2 GB of
RAM almost for free (exchanged for a Lacie FW400 PATA RAID box, which
I've got for free last year), added a SATA and SCSI controllers in
PCI/PCIe slots, coupled with the disk array from the previous
fileserver incarnation and a 120GB SSD and the machine is back in
operation.
I did some minor changes in the process of resuscitation: NetBSD was
replaced by Slackware Linux, because I discovered, that software RAID
in the latter is more than twice as fast and two 250GB disk drives
were replaced with a single 500GB one.
One TB may look as a quite tiny array (3x500 in RAID5), but as I have
mostly software and data for ancient computers there, it's more than
enough. For example the whole worldofspectrum.org is about 10 GB and
that is quite everything made for ZX Spectrum between 1982 and 2012,
including documentation, pictures, emulators and cross-platform tools.
So right now I am happy with the machine. Although I call it
a fileserver, it has full-featured desktop environment (xfce) and
I use it to sort the data a bit. My PM G5 is therefore officially
decommissioned and heading for a nice place in my computer collection.
And by the way - after three months of not using it, power consumption
of our household is 20 % lower.
