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Not 68K: Cube - plus some non-Mac rack servers.
Posted by: Anonymous Freak on 2013-06-15 19:59:22
All the talk of the upcoming Mac Pro had me renew my search for a Cube.

Picked one up today. 450 MHz, 640 MB RAM, original 20 GB hard drive, Rage 128 Pro graphics. Came with power supply, keyboard, and mouse. Good-but-not-great physical condition. A bunch of scuffs on the plastic, but no cracks. Talked the seller down to $100.

Now that I have a second ADC-equipped Mac, I did verify that the USB ports on my Studio Display are indeed dead. And one USB port on the Cube itself is iffy. (The plastic separator is gone, so have to be *EXTRA* gentle plugging/unplugging.) I may just put a Bluetooth dongle in the one good USB port and go wireless with it.

The hard drive is LOUD though - now I'll need to hunt for a PATA SSD (or get a PATA-to-CF adapter and a big CF card.)

Ironically, as I was driving to get it, I got a response on another Cube ad - $160 for a fully loaded Cube - 1.5 GHz CPU (plus fan,) 1.5 GB RAM, 120 GB hard drive *AND* a Studio Display. But, I'd already talked this guy down, so I would have felt bad backing out literally as I was driving over - and $60 is $60. If it had been a Cinema Display instead of a Studio Display, I probably would have gone ahead and gotten both.

Also picked up four rack servers. One 2U storage server (12 SATA drive bays) with a Pentium 4-era Xeon, two functional dual Pentium III servers plus a spare that is missing parts. The storage server was bought to be a storage server. The dual Pentium III machines are interesting - they are SGI 1100 machines (back during the first period that SGI flirted with x86 machines running customized Linux,) and they came from the Weta Digital render farm! These machines were used to render Lord of the Rings. They're pretty standard era Pentium 3 machines, and can run bog-standard Windows as well as Linux. I'd just been on the lookout for cheap low-power-consumption rack servers for a while, and found these. Ironically, they came from someone I went to high school with, so he gave me a big discount off his asking price.
Posted by: uniserver on 2013-06-15 20:03:55
i'd put the bluetooth adaptor in the iffy usb port and just leave it.. then you will still have a reliable usb port remaining.
Posted by: Bender on 2013-06-15 20:29:56
I wouldn't exactly call large rackmount servers low-power at all, especially a P4 Xeon server which you should be able to cook eggs on. 😛

Nice haul regardless... I wish cinema displays showed up around here, I'd wanted one for a while to match my G4 butf finding them locally is a pain.
Posted by: Anonymous Freak on 2013-06-15 22:56:05
Of the rack-mount servers, the storage server has a 400W PSU (which is supposed to run two P4-Xeons plus 12 hard drives,) and the P3 systems have 200W power supplies. *WAY* better than the dual-Woodcrest system that is my primary server with its redundant 800W PSU or my Itanium server with its two *NON* redundant 1200W PSUs.

I like the idea of putting the Bluetooth in the iffy slot - hadn't even thought of that!
Posted by: Trash80toHP_Mini on 2013-06-16 09:10:46
LOTRmachines! 8-o Dang, what I'd give for one of those. Nice! 😎

Posted by: Unknown_K on 2013-06-16 09:36:43
Are server supplies rated for actual continual power while desktop ones are rated for peak wattage?
Posted by: olePigeon on 2013-06-16 10:38:53
Need any patch panels? I have 2x brand new 48 port Cat 5e patch panels, and 1x 48 port regular Cat 5.
Posted by: Anonymous Freak on 2013-06-16 17:25:18
As for them being LOTR machines, the only artifact of that is the knowledge that the person I got them from isn't lying, and a small sticker that could easily be faked. (It's just a simple sticker, not an anti-theft or anything.) No original software or anything left - even the HDs are significantly newer (SATA card with SATA drives - which didn't exist when LOTR was being made.)

Yes, server PSUs are rated to run at that wattage 24/7.

No need for a patch panel, I'm just on the lookout for a rack-mount 16 or 24 port Gigabit switch, but just waiting for a deal, no hurry. (Don't even have a rack yet - I'll be remodeling the basement at some point and putting an enclosed rack in at that point.)
Posted by: antony701 on 2013-06-17 08:03:32
Congratulations on the Cube and the servers.

The hard drive is LOUD though - now I'll need to hunt for a PATA SSD (or get a PATA-to-CF adapter and a big CF card.)
It certainly is. I ordered SSD from OWC for it, and still haven't found a suitable PATA to STAT card for fitting the SSD into my Cube.

So the Cube is currently setting on the desk collecting dust.
Posted by: Bunsen on 2013-06-17 08:32:40
Seagate spinning platter PATA drives of that era are very quiet, and a good deal cheaper per GB than SSD/CF
Posted by: olePigeon on 2013-06-17 10:44:33
You'll want at least a 500x CF card with 40MB/sec write, 75MB/sec read. I was doing some research on it, and that should saturate your ATA-66 BUS, which has an average sustained read/write of 35MB/sec. You can get a 16GB 500x CF Card from B&H for $29 with free shipping & no tax. 32GB is $49, 64GB is $99.
Posted by: TheMacGuy on 2013-06-17 11:33:57
You can do what I did in my iMac G4 and take a 2.5" SATA SSD and a SATA to 40-pin IDE converter. It works quite well under Leopard and shouldn't have any problems with Tiger, but I would ask someone who has actually tried Tiger on an SSD.

SSD I used: http://www.frys.com/product/7395054?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG

2.5" to 3.5" drive holder: http://www.frys.com/product/7001131?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG

SATA to IDE Converter: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000ZLM9IA

I did try one of those really cheap converters on eBay and it didn't work. Someone on the CubeOwner forums was doing the same thing in their Cube and recommended the Startech adapter.
Posted by: CC_333 on 2013-06-17 13:27:03
Hi,

I ran Tiger briefly on an SSD installed in my Mac Pro, and it ran quite fast.

I would still use it, but the novelty wore off I think.

At least now I know how to do it!

c
Posted by: Cory5412 on 2013-06-17 19:29:56
but the novelty wore off I think.
It has always seemed odd to me for people to be unsure of why they did things.

Mac OS X has been pretty late to the SSD game, but even as far back as 10.4, which was well before SSDs were even a thing on desktop level computers, if you had a good SSD you should've noticed a pretty epic performance boost. I run them in my portables for durability reasons, and I'm getting to the point where I'm going to start putting them in all of my desktops for boot+apps. Maybe the reason you got rid of it was because your OS + apps exceeded the capacity of your SSD?

back during the first period that SGI flirted with x86 machines running customized Linux
The 1100 & Co are an interesting bunch, although if I was going to put it in periods, I'd say they're second period/generation machines, purely because they're "not the 320/540" -- and therefore, normal x86 computers, as you indicated.

Keep us posted on what you do with them though, be it transplant more modern components in there, or run linux on the PIII guts.

As a sidenote on power consumption -- servers don't always draw what their PSUs are rated for. If your Woodcrest system has iLO or DRAC/iDRAC or anything similar, you may be able to get a real, current, power usage number therein. My Westmere-EP system (one socket populated) with eight disks pulls 160W when running with the CPU pegged, and around 120 when "idling" (as idle as the machine in question can be.) And this is on a PSU rated for approximately 560W. (I've considered grabbing a second PSU for it, that would be for failover operation though, rather than supplying more power. There are also 800W PSUs available for my system, and the next generation forward has dual 1100W PSUs available for it, but that's for configs with things like four big workstation GPUs.)
Posted by: CC_333 on 2013-06-17 21:00:55
Maybe the reason you got rid of it was because your OS + apps exceeded the capacity of your SSD?
Actually, Tiger's smaller footprint made it quite easy to fit everything on the 30 GB SSD, I just couldn't figure out what to use it for that Snow Leopard or Lion/Mountain Lion couldn't do better (except maybe being able to write/format disks in HFS Standard, but I could use my G4 with Leopard for that).
I tried running Mountain Lion on it too, and it worked wonderfully, but for that, it did start getting cramped, so I reverted to the 1 TB spinning disk drive, and it's plenty fast for now.

c
Posted by: TheMacGuy on 2013-06-17 21:30:54
I wouldn't run Mountain Lion on anything smaller then a 64GB SSD. Anything below that gets cramped quick. I went with the 120GB in the iMac because A. it was the smallest size Fry's had when I bought it and B. Leopard being the space hog it is, I didn't feel comfortable with something smaller then the original Seagate (Apple Certified) HDD which was 80GB.
Posted by: CelGen on 2013-06-23 23:40:00
The USB ports on studio displays are passive. If it isn't a cold joint in the monitor it's at the pivot point on the connector.
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