[zac]

I'd like to find an older powermac with gigabit ethernet, load it up with hard drives (RAID?) and use it as a fileserver on my home network.
I have a few PCs on the network and a gigabook.

What sort of powermac should I look for? I don't think it needs to be especially fast - it will just be storing my mp3s, iMovie projects, etc ... Gigabit ethernet is important to me. Can this be added to older powermacs with a pci card?

Also, are there any particular models that can hold more hard drives than others? Models to avoid?

Thanks in advance,

Zac

[nerd]

For gigabit I wouldn't do anything less then a G4. They're the only ones that came with Gigabit. I'm not sure if anyone is making Gigabit cards for Macs. ? My G3 400 at home will barley keep up with big files, I'll get about 8-9.5MB/sec. Gigabit ethernet between my friends computer and mine (crossover cable) got about 35MB/sec on big files.

As far as RAID I would do RAID 5. People will say it's slow but it's not at lest on Linux and Windows 2000. On my Red Hat box at home transferring 100MB ethernet the RAID driver only takes .08% of CPU time. Windows 2000 takes 1.2% in the same situation. Now I can't speak for Hard Disk RAID Tools (used to be NXRAID). Everything I have read says it's slow and they don't support it on a G3 because of some kind of bug.

Brad

[eggman]

I'm not sure if anyone is making Gigabit cards for Macs.

CNET Techcnologies makes a 10/100/1000Mbps Gigabit Ethernet Adapter that comes with an OS X driver....

http://www.cnetusa.com/product/specs/prog2000l(b).htm