[Cadaver]

Does anyone know if the power supply in a GigE G4 would sufficiently power 5 internal hard drives (plus the optical)??

I'm thinking about building a home theatre DVD movie server out of a soon-to-be retired G4 I've got at the office.

The machine has a Radeon 8500 video card in it, which has the necessary S-video out to route to the TV. I'll add a Revolution audio card for a digital audio signal for the surround processor.

I have a PCI ATA-133 controller card for it, and was thinking about adding four 400GB drives, formatted as one big stripe volume, to hold the contents of my DVDs. Then just opening the necessary Video_TS folders to play them. The fifth drive would be run off the internal ATA bus to boot from.

Think the power supply will handle this?? If not, I'll just go external. But internal preferred for space purposes (yes, I may have to upgrade the internal cooling, I know).

[SSharon]

I think it should handle it fine. You will only be reading from the boot drive and one other drive at any given time so all of the other drives can spin down and use less power, you could even unmount them. You also won't be using that much power for anything else. Powermacs have been sold to hold four internal drives (MDD) and I think the difference in PSU's is max 100w, in addition the PSU's that apple was giving to quiet the MDD were less powerful than the original and if they can still power four drives, two opticals, and two procs, than you should be ok with any PSU ~300w or more is my guess.

[Lateralus]

I don't know, powering that much equipment with a 220w PSU seems a little risky.

[Cadaver]

I'll probably go external with something like a 1.0TB LaCie Big Disk Extreme. But it would be fun to build 1.72TB internally (4x400GB + 1x120GB) in to a G4, for nothing other than the geek-factor.

1000GB divided by ~8GB per DVD = ~125 DVDs. I think I've got around 85 now (including my kids' flicks), so should be OK on space for a little while yet. I could save on space by just copying over the main feature. Hmmm... Maybe I'll need 2TB

[deboerjo]

I wouldn't do more than the 3 or 4 drives along the bottom for the sake of cooling. That 3.5" bay in front doesn't get any air circulation.

[UnixMac]

I think the typical drive consumes between 12-20 watts in normal use, so I would use that as a model. But when you add the Logic board, CPU, GPU and memory, that quickly can consume 220watts..

Also, does anyone know if OS X normally spins down the non-boot drives, no matter what? Or is that done thru a setting of some kind? Cause my second drive seems to spin down, even though my energy management doesn't have that box checked.

[SSharon]

On second thought you should go external. After looking up the power specs I hadn't realized that the gigE only has a 220w supply. I must have been thinking of the dig. audio which has about 330w. Also why are you buying from lacie instead of using your own enclosures. And why not compress the dvd's down to 4.4gb so you can burn them if need be and save space while losing little quality.

[macaddict0001]

Don't most retail dvd's have a copyright feature that prevents them from being copyed? Or is their some way to do it. I have tried with a disc image and can't get video from it, however I haven't tried with just duplicating the video_ts folder, does anyone know if this is possible.?

[Cadaver]

Originally posted by SSharon:
And why not compress the dvd's down to 4.4gb so you can burn them if need be and save space while losing little quality.

I wont need to burn anything, since these are already DVDs I own. I'm not copying anything. And these will be shown on a 50" RPTV, so I don't want to reduce the quality by compressing them.