The Death of a Dream

So, I've mentioned in the past how I've taken my old G4, stuck in a Sonnet Tempo SATA card which allowed me to stick a couple 500 GB drives in there. I may have even mentioned how much fun it was to get things up and running, since the Firmware on the card didn't like the fact that my G4 was running 10.2. After a week or two or troubleshooting, I figured that out, upgraded the machine  to Tiger and everything worked great.

Or at least, it did, until last week, when it decided to go down again. And suddenly, I am left with no network storage, and most of my files are inaccessible. Yes, I have a backup and a backup to my backup, the trouble is I was still getting things running the way I wanted them to, and my backups backup hadn't been backed up in a month or two. My backup is still accessible, but for now I've turned off the machine and am just waiting for my new Drobo to arrive. 

As much fun as I had cobbling something together, I need reliability more than I need cheap. And the Drobo is nothing if not reliable. When doing these sort of projects, I want to spend all my time figuring stuff out up front, and then, once things are figured out, I want them to run smoothly from now on. Taking down my storage for a week, just at the start of the busy season? That's one strike and you're out. The trouble right now with the Drobo is that I didn't spend the $199 to get the Network attachment, so my wife won't be able to use the system. But I've got a new drive waiting to be installed, and as soon as the drobo is up, I'm taking and dropping all the files off my old portable drive onto it, so she can have her own portable drive for back-up.  (All the files from the old portable should be on the new portable as well as on my backup, so it's just a matter of verifying that there's nothing on there that is unique to it and then wiping it; that's actually what I was doing when the G4 conked out).

Is turning a G4 into a NAS drive a bad idea? If you need 100% reliability? Maybe. And I'm still not sure if it was the drive or the controller that went. If it the drive, I have to apologize to the controller. If it was the controller...you got sum splainin' to do....