Taking apart an older model Velociraptor.

Lol!
Thanks Hatter, I knew I saw that someplace. But the supplied hexes don't work on the VR, should I just use a screw driver? At least now I know it's the four screws, or whatever they are, on top. Of course this voids the warranty on the two drives, but I didn't really have a choice. No choice that is if I wanted to keep the drives internal. As it is, one, maybe two, for the time being, will be on the outside. Steps to resolve that will arrive soon.

The Thermaltake... guess what. Won't work with the same style VRs. On the other hand, for some older drives I have it works just great.

Thanks Hatter,... UPS has ten minutes to make the delivery time, I've been up and waiting all day. Feels a bit like Christmas. It's here!

Hey Hatter,

Forgive my temporary absence. First I have to deal with the aftermath of a two story climb and then I'll be seeing just what it is in this large, heavy, white box. 🙂

Torx #8... got em together... goin in...

once the dust settles

Ooh, that might take a bit, perhaps by days end maybe. Depends on how much I linger in pleasant bewilderment. Have to say, it really feels like I got a new Mac, as in I haven't figured it all out yet.

My clone wouldn't start it, just a gray screen. The clone I really wanted to start from, on the 150HLFS, well, that disk has not wanted to fit yet. That's a bit of a mystery that I need todays good daylight to tackle. I put in the WD640 last night instead, which has my other clone, Time Machine, and, gulp, 10.4 on it. The MaxUpgrade sleds worked like a charm, I have two 300gb VRs up and running.
But I wasted a lot of time trying to put a fresh, from my new dvds, system on one, and them (yep, tried to stripe the two together for fun). Do I hear someone in the audience saying "format scheme"? As in some Intelish-hellish format scheme? Perhaps I do, I'm still somewhat befogged.
Migration Assistant was out helping other people yesterday, I got few benefits from it. Well, it remembered my Mail settings, which is more than I had the intelligence to write down or remember.
Otherwise, transferring over the account from the Quad made a sick puppy of an account on this Mac.
The most I accomplished at days end was using Superduper (downloaded fresh from the net) to clone this Macs original drive to one of the VRs. I didn't expect that to work either, but it did. I like that program more and more.
So today's endeavors will be, one, installing a fresh new system on one of my drives, minus the gunk.
Two, resurrecting one of my clones to work.
Three, go back inside the Mac again, find the power connector I need for my Sonnet card and get the rest of my drives online. And while there, try to figure out why the 150VR didn't fit.

So far, even though in my egotistical mind I thought I would have everything set up and ready to go in a half hour or less, there's a sweet-sour misery I'm feeling that I'm enjoying very much. 🙂

I haven't taken PS4 or AE3 for a spin yet. Those are pleasures I'm waiting on. As far as games though, well, do I embarrass myself by admitting that Star Wars Battlefront is a favorite? It's so darn pretty. Too bad, even though I saw on a list that it was playable on an IntelMac, it doesn't play on mine. 😟 Shouldn't Rosetta be helping me out a bit? Where is she, I want to talk to her supervisor.

Thanks Hatter,

Appreciate your insight, and the shared enjoyment. 🙂

GUID, aye, there may lie the rub. It helps one to click on the disks OSX doesn't want to install on. It told me right there of what next step to try. I think it will work this time, after repartitioning the disks.

I think I'll forget about the clones, except as something to pull things from, and just start fresh as a daisy. I've been wanting to do that for awhile but dreaded the hassle. Seems like a perfect time now though. (oh where oh where might all my software discs be...)

Firewire... that will be manageable tomorrow after a delivery from OWC. My one FW drive now is not FW800, hence, out of the loop for now.

The sleds worked great (after I learned what a torx wrench is). But it's odd that the 150GB VR HLFS, one with the new backplane set-up, does not seem to fit. It goes in almost all the way and then stops.

I didn't start it up as soon as I got it out of the box. First I tried to get the disks set up and then I installed 12 gig of RAM I got from OWC. Boy, the RAM was simple to put in, the removable tray is great. Oh, yes, the way the HDs go in is great too. I think I must have put the RAM in right although I forgot the diagrams I had seen for best performance. At least it shows up fine and there is no warning (which I hear is a new feature) that it's not put in well. Two slots are open, though I'm hearing now that for the most part filling all the slots doesn't seem to matter as much. Apple is funny, 6 1gb sticks.

Another clone is finished, and it's time to partition a drive or two. If I can install from my DVDs onto one of them, I'll go ahead and hook up the rest of the drives. Things are moving forward... I hope 😉

In Disk Utility I had to click on the drive, click on the Partition window, choose one partition (could have made more), and only then did I get the option to format GUID. After that the install from the DVD went like a charm.

I've re-found the manual and I may have put the RAM in differently from what they show. I'll check that out when I hook up the rest of my drives now.

I'm getting a FW800 case tomorrow from OWC, it will fit two drives. Should do the job ok.

I didn't know about AHT, thanks for the tip. Not sure how I ever would have run across that one, I didn't see it in the manual.

I'm waiting for the VR 300GB to drop down to $199

Aren't you really waiting for the 80GB Intel X25-M to reach some semblance of a reasonable price? Considering what I paid for all my VRs, let alone the Mac Pro, even those are out of my budget. 😟 🙂

Hey Hatter,

It was a trial, but I got all of my disks to show up, and then some. The Sonnet software for my card didn't work but another did. Granted it's messy with cables hanging out the back and the bare Jive sitting out, but I should resolve that tomorrow. And I have a bare drive sitting in the optical tray.
For the meantime I think I'll try partitioning the VRs as I did in my Quad as a RAID boot and a scratch disk.
No luck on getting the 150hlfs to fit, I wonder if other people are having the same problem. It's sitting in the Jive now.

So it's up and fully charged. Now it's reinstalling software and copying. After I set up the RAID the first couple of apps I will copy over will be xbench and geekbench. I just have to see those numbers.

Thanx for your help, my friend. I'll post back at least once more, just to show the changed sig and hopefully some good numbers. 🙂

Preliminary results, minus a RAID that refused to boot.
Geekbench: Quad 3431, Mac Pro 14717
xBench: Quad 142.92, Mac Pro 325.45

Feels a little soulless, probably an A. Grove feature, but I think I've found a new friend. 🙂

PS4 and AE3 run very fast. Exporting 3D video from Photoshop is very fast now, many, I don't know how many times faster than the Quad. Tomorrow I'll run the digilloyd tests to see how much faster it is than the results I got with the Quad. It should be stellar. AE3 is real quick. I have some tests I would like to perform with it as well, but just in the little time I used it, it flew.
Both apps fully recognize and utilize the 4870. I was worried about that.
I had a feeling that both apps were just waiting for this machine and it turns out to be true. It was worth the upgrade just to use them as they run now.
And my game of games, SWB, miraculously runs just great now... just by copying its folder over to this drive. Strange.

RAID-wise, I think it must be the Sonnet card. While I used the same steps to create a bootable RAID array on my G5,... DU, SuperDuper, DiskWarrior, it's not taking on this Mac. But I did manage to create a bootable array using the 3 VRs that are mounted internally (under the optical drive counts), and I made a scratch disk of the remaining parts of all the 5 VRs. Just playing for now, really. Raised my Geekbench score to a nice rounded 15000 though.

I always thought the Quad was snappy and smooth, much more so than the other G5s I owned. This Mac is just plain out smooth. Things just happen or appear, silently and out of thin air. "Snap" just doesn't seem to have any relevance anymore.

Well, I'll cry like the rest when the even newer models come out, but I think this Mac is going to fit the bill for me for a very long time. It's a weird feeling to have a top of line machine again, I've chased them ever since I first got a Mac. Only a month or so did I maintain a spot at the top and that happened only once, with yet another Windows machine pushing me out. So it's kind of like the old days again, I have the top of the line Mac, but the PCs still rein just ahead of me. But that's cool, that doesn't bother me at all anymore. I'm finally in the realm of fast is fast and there's not much I can see to quibble about anymore. Well done, Apple.