If you wanted to put it in your basement and run it as a headless server, then a copy of Mac OS X Server (of appropriate vintage) would be a good value. You can always find those on eBay.
The box holds four 3.5" drives, so get some big ones, and see what you could do to stripe them together. I don’t think the RAID 5 card that Apple bundled with Server will work on that machine, but I could be wrong. Another good eBay find, but be careful of precisely which version you get. You could always have a single boot volume of 250GB or so, and stripe three remaining drives together in software and use that as your data volume. You can’t boot from a soft RAID.
Server is not a pig for RAM, but more is always better.
Other than that, I don’t know what I would do with that Mac. You could use it for elderly software that you don’t want to upgrade, or to drive a scanner. But seriously, you could also heat your house with it in the winter – they draw a fair number of watts.
Walter
On Aug 27, 2013, at 3:08 PM, Todd wrote:
I have a last generation G5 Power Mac (no stock Wi-Fi or Bluetooth). Yes it’s old but it’s still a brute of a computer in its own right. I could sell it and maybe get $200 if I’m lucky but I don’t want to go that route and would rather find a good secondary use it for it but I’m not sure what exactly. Because it’s so modular I would be willing to throw a limited amount of $ at it and upgrade/add some things to make it more modern but I don’t know what’s worth upgrading and what’s not.
So, I’m open to any suggestions for realistic uses considering its outdated hardware/software: development server, music server etc. Also, what would be the most useful or necessary upgrades without breaking the bank, in your opinion?
Todd
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