G4 400 vs Mac Mini

[gloriahanger]

I need to set up a new home server as my current PPC G5 powermac is being relocated to more important tasks.

I have a old G4 400 with 700+ meg of ram in at my disposal or I can grab a new Mac Mini.

I know that if I went with a mini I will only have one NIC which is a issue because currently the server performs auth for the adsl line then spits it back out over the other nic with DNS and lots of other services. So thats a problem, also, the mini has drive limitations with only one internal drive but I’m not sure of the upgrade path and how other people have put in new drives. I was thinking of looking for a SATA controller that works with the mini then building some kind of SATA raid or at the least, going with firewire. I like this SATA solution with the mini because of speed and because I do need to buy new drives (want 1TB of network space minimum).

Question is, would the G4 keep up with 1+ TB of IDE storage and also do simple firewall/dns at the same time? In the past, I have run web services on it and it struggles to generate pretty standard php pages in less than a second. Should it be fine as a storage box?

I guess I would rather go with a mini and have everything central accross one server but if I had to use the g4 for the two nic’s to bring in the connection it would be ok (but really not the best solution). Anybody used third party NIC’s on minis before, its only a 24mbps connection so I was thinking about a USB NIC dongle as I have heard of them being used before.

Any help would be great guys! Thanks, great resource!

[deemery]

If you go over to Sustworks.com, Peter Sichel provides drivers for selected USB/Ethernet adapters. For a fairly long time, I was using a Mac Mini with the USB/Ethernet talking to the outside world (i.e. my cable modem) and the onboard ethernet talking to the LAN. I wasn’t running X Server on this machine, instead I was running Sustwork’s IPNetRouter (a -really superb product- that gave me years of great performance and substantial security with almost zero effort after I got the installation working, and outstanding tech support from Peter, too!)

The 2 problems with the Mini are

1. it’s only 100BaseT, not GigE.

2. Its internal disk is slow and it’s only FW 400 coming out.

I don’t know about the latest Intel Minis, but my original 1st Gen mini got better perfomance from an external FW400 drive; I bought one of the OWC drive cases designed to fit under a Mini.

I think the Mini will be much faster than the old G4/400, but you’ll want to make sure your Mini has at least 1gb of RAM in it.

I did have X Server running on my (PPC) Mini for a while, but moved it over to a G4/933 so that I could mount more hard drives into the server machine.

dave

[wiltzius]

The new Mini is GigE and they upgraded the internal HD to SATA. As far as speed goes it is still a 5400 RRM Laptop HP so it is not as fast as a 7200 or 10K Raptor but it is a good bit faster then then origianl Mini i had. There are also 4 USB ports on the mini now so you should be able to handel what you toss at it.

[halimedia]

I have used G4 and intel minis as routers, servers and firewalls with great success. The performance of the current model is incredible, considering the price. Whenever the need arises, I use the aforementioned sustworks-drivers to add additional ethernet interfaces – so far without issues. Disk storage is of course a limitation that minis have. Using an external FW400 solution is the easiest way to expand, but performance is limitted. It should, however, be possible to use the internal SATA-connector and route it to an external enclosure, offering you many more and higher performance storage options. Lastly, the Mac mini’s socketted CPU allows for an upgrade path to Core2Duo-silicon. I truly love these little boxes – reasonably adaptable, inexpensive and highly reliable!

That said, you could install a CPU-upgrade in your G4 and get a few more years of use out of it, but the price of the upgrade alone would be close to that of a new Mac mini.

HTH,

Ron

[tonypowell]

I have just set up a G4 400 to act as the server, it replaces a G4 mac mini with 2 FW400 external hard drives working as a mirrored raid.

I have put in a PCI SATA card to the G4 and added 2 500GB SATA drives, which I have mirrored. I also added a gigabit ethernet card. I have enabled NAT, and got the original ethernet port connected to my adsl router, and the 1GB port connected to a gigabit switch.

I have done this partly as an experiment to see if the G4 is up to the job. I am using it in a domestic setting, with 4 client macs, one of which has 1GB ethernet.

I am hoping that the limitations of the G4 processor will be ameliorated by the gigabit ethernet connection and the sata card and drives.

If it works well, I might consider upgrading the processor.

I too am a fan of the mac mini, I just wish that the latest offering had 802.11n.

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