Technically, last of the G5 Workstations. But Mad Max is cool, dammit.

The only major hurdle with the upgrade was getting my system configuration and user data pulled off of idoru's root disk. I figured I'd do what I usually do - yank the source drive, plug it into a spare bay in the target, and go nuts. Then I {realized|remembered} that idoru's a bitch - both 450g drives are seriously, pliers-and-clamps stuck in the drive bays. No way in hell were they coming out - and one of the JOYOUS bits of the first generation G5 design is that you have to pull the "b" drive in order to remove the "a" drive - something they've since fixed. What proceeded was a grossly inconvenient ghettohack.

 

SATA data line from idoru's / through a PCI slot in aleph into the "b" slot on aleph's motherboard. You'd think that's no big thing, until you realize that while the transfer is going on, idoru sounds like this (288k mp3).

Good thing my headphones are insulated.

The funky thing about a firewire or local disk transfer of user and system information is that some stuff doesn't move over for some reason, and some things get wonky - my monitors came up in reverse order (expected) and with a wallpaper I haven't used in a year (unexpected). Energy Saver was set for install defaults (blink and the machine sleeps, expected but still high on the "this is a BUG NOT A FEEJUR" list*), and for some reason Soundtrack barfs because it can't find G4 hardware. Odd, seeing as how I never installed it on one. Fireworks demanded to call home and Final Cut Studio wanted the serial number reinput. Photoshop forgot all of its palette layouts (it does that), and it turns out that the cute little CPU Monitor I've been hanging onto since Jaguar can only see two processors.

Aside from that, the hardware is a lot quieter than idoru.

Off the cuff observations on the new kit:

The third USB port on the back is a nice addition, or will be for one of my coworkers. The modem port is gone, and the ethernet port has moved to the top of the motherboard and cloned itself. I found this a little odd at first, but dual NICs out of the box has a few advantages - servers, routers, stuff like that. There's now a strip of plastic under the case latch, which I assume is part of the liquid cooling system. The video card is pretty sweet - it's an NVidia (bias - I have a preference for ATI) and handles the Doom 3 test nicely. Dual DVI means I finally don't have to worry about blowing the video card in the event of a power surge.** I haven't used the optical drive yet, but Toast 5 picks it up, for great justice. The mega mega happy is the tweaks to the drive cage - the A drive can now be pulled without having to remove the B drive first. <3.

Oh, and the Firewire 800? Finally using it, with a bigass LaCie drive. Well, four 500g drives in a hardware RAID 0. Not something to keep permanent data on, but more than enough space to work with on Big Video Projects.

* Nothing like having to babysit a workstation through a 180 gig file copy. You'd think you could just kick it loose, walk away and come back in a couple of hours, but nooooo. Hell, the OS X operating system installer fucking falls asleep during the install. To "make up" for this chronic narcolepsy, the power button on the front of the machine is now heavy-breathing degrees of hair trigger. It may well have been hair-trigger on first generation hardware - see above re: energy settings.

** This has happened three times. Two G4/733s and one G5. Two at work, one at home. At work, the mobos went kerplooey as well and the whole mess was replaced under Applecare. At home, the mobo survived and OWC replaced the video card for cost of shipping it back to them.