Upgrading The Computer You've Already Got: All The Hard Work's Not For Naught

I made substantial forward progress last night in upgrading both my dual G4 (aka ‘Quicksilver’) and dual G5 Power Macs (here’s last Thursday’s follow-up piece), and therefore thought you might be interested in an update to yesterday’s two-part report. One critical aspect of my success was the Macally FireWire enclosure I ordered late last week from Newegg (but is now listed as ‘deactivated’ on the retailer website…wonder if I bought the last one in inventory?), which UPS dropped off at my front door yesterday afternoon.

I first confirmed that (unlike with its ADS Technologies predecessor) I was able to not only access but also boot the system from a properly partitioned hard drive within the enclosure. Then I yanked the original 40 GByte HDD out of the system’s secondary IDE channel, since I now had an alternative means of accessing it should I ever need to do so in the future. By means of explaining my FireWire fixation, note that PowerPC-based Macs (unlike their Intel-based successors) can’t alternatively boot from USB, and anyway this Quicksilver system natively includes only molasses-slow USB v1 capabilities. The drive bay freed up by this amputation enabled me to add the GeeThree Sweet Multiport kit I’ve mentioned before:

Sweet Multiport consists of two PCBs, one fitting inside the Quicksilver system’s 3.5" (and other systems’ 5.25") drive bay and the other plugging into a free PCI slot, whose power connections are the only signals it subsequently employs. The main system shown in the picture above is a Mirrored Drive Door unit, the last of the Power Mac G4 families. My older Quicksilver system is the one on the left in the inset circle; as you can see, the product’s Memory Stick and Secure Digital/MultiMediaCard reader slots are inaccessible in my particular case. However, Sweet Multiport still gives me a CompactFlash/Microdrive slot, along with two front-panel FireWire ports and a frontside USB connector.

The kit’s PCI card also supplies two additional general-purpose backside USB ports, along with two added back-panel FireWire ports. A third iteration of each backside port flavor has a different use; GeeThree also includes USB and FireWire cables in the kit, intended for you to jumper the PCI card to one each of the Quicksilver system’s built-in USB and FireWire connectors. As such, you end up with a net sum gain of one with each interface technology’s backside connector total count. Jumpering is an interesting design approach, which certainly reduced the cost and complexity of GeeThree’s product versus an alternative implementation that might derive USB and FireWire capabilities from PCI bus address, control and data signals. And Sweet Multiport’s USB hub is of the high-speed USB2 flavor, as it turns out, so if you were to jumper it to a USB2 add-in card, the Sweet Multiport-added USB connections would all be 400 Mbps-capable.

Originally, both the G4 and G5 Power Macs contained Pioneer DVR-106 DVD burners. I decided to leave the one in the Quicksilver system as-is, while still upgrading the one in the Power Mac G5 to a DVR-109 (thereby giving me a spare used DVR-106 for the Quicksilver along with a spare new DVR-109 for the Power Mac G5). I’ll have more to say about this in a bit; for now let’s switch system focuses and look at the Power Mac G5’s mirrored RAID setup. I ended up deciding not to wait for SoftRAID v4; I went ahead and upgraded the OS 10.5-based set from Apple RAID to SoftRAID v3.6.8. It was pretty easy, once I had the Macally enclosure in-hand. I:

• Stuck a spare PATA HDD in the enclosure, and used Carbon Copy Cloner v3 to copy the mirrored RAID image to it.
• Booted off the cloned image in the FireWire enclosure.
• Installed SoftRAID on it, and then used SoftRAID to convert the partitions on both Western Digital 640 GByte HDDs from Apple RAID to SoftRAID.
• Rebooted the system, this time from the SoftRAID mirrored set

And, as the screenshots below show, earlier this morning I subsequently had the timely ‘opportunity’ to leverage SoftRAID’s auto-rebuild capabilities on both Power Macs:

I’d accidentally hit the on/off button on the power strip feeding both systems. Sigh ;-). As the screenshot below shows, the subsequent rebuild operation on the Power Mac G5 actually re-sync’d two mirrored sets; the original 250 GByte Maxtor HDDs containing OS 10.3 and created using SoftRAID v3.5.6, and the new 640 GByte WD HDDs with OS 10.5 installed on them:

Both rebuilds completed fine, as did the rebuild of the mirrored RAID set in the Power Mac G4. 

When I cracked open the Power Mac G5’s case this morning, I did several different surgeries (although in retrospect I realize I’d forgotten to install the Fastmac Bluetooth module). First off, I went ahead and ‘threw caution to the wind’, swapping out the two 512 MByte DDR400 DIMMs with 1 GByte replacements. Fortunately, Rember tells me that all four modules now have identical timing specifications:

and as I type this, I’m more than two-thirds of the way through a three-loop (just to be sure) thorough Rember system memory test, with no problems uncovered so far.

Secondly, I re-routed power going to the HDDs mounted to the WiebeTech G5Jam replacement side panel. Previously, you may recall, I was tapping into the Molex power connector on one of the two Maxtor HDDs mounted in the primary drive bay. Now, by virtue of a Molex Y-adapter, I’m instead leveraging the power cable feeding the optical drive. This redirection will enable me to put Molex-less Western Digital 300 GByte VelociRaptor 10,000 RPM HDDs in the primary drive bay, RAID 0-striped for even more speed.

While messing around with the optical drive hookups, I went ahead and upgraded from a DVR-106 to (what was supposedly) a DVR-109, thereby (again supposedly) giving me dual-layer DVD+R burning capabilities along with 16x DVD burning speeds. The drive, which I’d bought on sale from Other World Computing, was marked as a Pioneer DVR-109AB and even had the OEM logo stamped on it indicative of an Apple-sanctioned firmware inside. But when I powered up the system, the drive identified itself as a DVR-127D without dual-layer DVD burning capabilities and capable of only 8x write rates.

Google research suggested that the combination of a Terminal command-line utility called DVRFlash and an official Pioneer two-file DVR-109 firmware image would set me straight, and indeed this ended up being the case. For anyone who might be interested in following in my footsteps, I had to use the ‘-ff’ flag to convince DVRFlash to do the update, by virtue of the non-matching original-drive-and-update-firmware product names. I don’t believe that the resultant DVR-109 would be usable as-is in OS 10.3 or OS 10.4 (and their associated apps) without additional third-party hacking assistance, because of those O/S versions’ insistence on OEM firmware versions, However, Apple seems to have loosened the reins with OS 10.5, commensurate with its conversion to Intel CPUs and other PC-sourced hardware.

p.s…I’m still waffling on whether or not to upgrade the Power Mac G5’s graphics capabilities beyond their current Radeon 9600XT foundation to the Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition. Ebay perusal suggests that I could actually get more than I originally paid for the Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition if I sold it…that is as long as I don’t crack open the shrinkwrap. Hmmm…