upgrade my current machine, a G4 867mhz Quicksilver, to a new G5
Starting out I had in the case, the mother board, a number of fans, the startup drive, optical drive, and four drives set up as a RAID. later I added two more in Raid configuration… We again started to run out of storage, so it became time to upgrade.I decided to go with different RAID cards. While Highpoint’s 1820A works great on the Mac, SMART status was not available, so I bought two of Highpoints RocketRAID 2220 cards. One problem and I think it’s sort of a pain, is that some of your RAIDs may not survive the upgrade of the card, so have a backup of the RAIDs. Other then that the cards work great in the Mac.
I then added my additional drives, I’m at 13 now, plus the optical drive. After getting everything connected up for the first time, I turned on the power, the computer started to come on, but a second later turned off… after a little detective work, and this is something I was afraid of, I found the stock power supply was not enough…
After looking around on xlr8yourmac, I decided to try making a wire harness to convert a stock ATX power supply into a mac supply. I have done this with a “Yikes” model successfully, this was a quicksilver though and I knew I was missing the 24v+, but I thought the mac might just pass that on… long story short it didn’t and would not boot…
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The solution I came up with was to keep the mother board powered by the stock power supply and using the 600 watt supply to power everything else. After searching around online, I found the following link on how to convert the ATX power supply into a Lab power supply and keep it on without a computer… http://web2.murraystate.edu/andy.batts/ps/POWERSUPPLY.HTM
You don’t need to mod as much as the link shows, I just needed the info on the 10 ohm resister to again wire into a harness (I like to keep the actual supply stock so that if it fails, I can easily get a replacement) so that I could at the flip of a switch turn on the auxiliary power supply and power up everything else. After connecting everything up it worked perfectly, the one thing I didn’t like was the secondary switch on the back of the computer, after a little more thought I decided I would fix that as well.
My goal was to be able to push the power button on the front of the computer and have everything start up normal… like a Mac, so I needed one power supply to turn on the other… how? With a little Relay. I found one from Radio Shack that was a 10-volt model that trips immediately, that way after the mother board does its self tests, the drives are powered up and ready to boot the server.
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