Hi All,

I'm faced with an interesting conundrum. As you may know, I am a reasonably happy Drobo user. I say reasonably because there's some combination of Dell PC, firewire card, and Windows XP incompatibility with FW800 that I can't resolve. Either the Drobo will work with FW800 at 100 Mbp/s, or it simply won't work at all depending on which FW800 card I use. Regardless of which FW800 card I use, having the Drobo connected will often cause the Dell PC to be unable to shut down. This has forced me to rely on USB 2.0 for my Drobo conection for about a year now.

Whether the FW800 connection will actually be twice as fast as USB 2.0 on the Drobo is debatable, but it certainly can't be any slower. In short, I'm ready to make a move to FW800 and ditch the 2TB NTFS Partition size limit imposed on Windows XP and prior Windows OSs.

My OS options are Windows 7, Linux, or Mac OS 10.5.

Windows 7: I actually installed this beast on the promise that Microsoft updated the 1394 stack to actually work with FW800 devices at the proper speed. They apparently delivered, but I can't get past the inability to shut down the PC. To be fair, I assume this is a Dell problem or whatever cheap Chinese FW800 cards I keep buying.

Linux: This is a tempting option since I have lots of hardware around that could be made useful. Unfortunately, Drobo doesn't have a native helper app and I'm reluctant to trust TBs of data to this scheme.

Mac OS 10.5: I have a G4 Sawtooth that I frankensteined into a 1.0GHz, 2GB RAM, Gigabit box of usefulness. Unfortunately, I haven't yet found a use for it... until now.

The G4 box uses less power than my Dell that I currently leave running 24/7 and I believe having a gigabit ethernet & FW800 card should make it faster than USB 2.0 connected directly to the Dell. So, I can keep the Windows box off until I need it and the rest of my client machines can also enjoy the increased speed when not on wireless.

The only thing holding me back at the moment is Mozy's apparent requirement that Spotlight be active. I disabled Spotlight on the G4 to save precious resources. No doubt, the machine is more responsive without it.

I'm not married to Mozy, but I have enjoyed their service with the Windows client for a while now. I know there are more competitors now than back when I joined Mozy, so I'm sure some of you have experience with a couple. Carbonite, CrashPlan, Backblaze, and ElephantDrive are a few I've come across. All of these are about $5/month for unlimited storage. My current backup set is at 180GB, but it keeps growing so I would prefer an unlimited service. Unfortunately, "requires Spotlight", isn't turning up anything useful for the services I mentioned.

Any recommendations from the Mac folks? Also, feel free to tell me I'm barking up the wrong tree with G4+FW800+Gigabit idea.

On the Mac side, you may want to downgrade to 10.4, as it should run better on the hardware you have, possibly enough to turn Spotlight back on.

Online backup services, can't really comment there. Mine is a combination of MobileMe iDisk, and rsyncs to a Time Capsule at a relatives place back in Colorado. Not fully automated yet, been meaning to script something on my old PowerPC mini to open various time machine backups and send the files over on a regular basis.

If your backup is only 180GB, why not just get a 500GB hard drive to back up to and call it good?

That requires motivation to actually shuttle a hard drive to and from my house. I prefer set it and forget it.

10.4 isn't a bad idea. I originally upgraded to Leopard for some iLife thing that required it. I have a Macbook for that now, so 10.4 is doable on the G4.

Transmission doesn't work on 10.4 anymore. I find the development direction of this application contradictory. They omit basic built-in features like RSS support in the name of keeping the application small and lean. uTorrent (on Windows) is more feature-rich at a fraction of the size. And what's the point of being lean if you're not going to support a major OS still in heavy use that's likely running on legacy hardware?

I realize Transmission is supporting two architectures in their 5MB package, but it's still way out of line with uTorrent's sub-300k installed size.

I can entertain the 10.4 idea if there are recommendations for a torrent client with RSS support. Preferably built-in RSS, Web UI, and doesn't require X11 (like Deluge).

µTorrent exists for MacOS 10.5 now....

Transmission can watch a directory for new torrent files, so it's pretty easy to have a second program grab them from an RSS feed and plop them in that directory.

Of course, that all is still 10.5.

How about compiling Transmission as a cli app for 10.4? No reason that shouldn't work that I can see.

It's Intel-only.


It's easier and more likely that I would just use an older version of Transmission that supports 10.4.

Aside from Spotlight, 10.5 is currently working great on this machine. I may just continue with 10.5 and prevent Spotlight from indexing directories that won't be backed up to Mozy.

I just keep downloads of the torrent nature to my PVR server that runs Windows. I don't think I'll ever need to run anything but µTorrent. I can't see how anyone else can do it any better without creating an entirely too bloated app - like Vuze (which is also available for Mac OS). In my limited testing, µTorrent under Windows was also faster than Vuze and Bitrocket in Mac OS.

BTW, older versions of Transmission may give you problems with some trackers that ban an assortment of version numbers. More than likely to be private-type trackers though. Don't know if other clients will have any type of connection preference though.

I do love uTorrent as well, but I'd rather keep just one machine running, so I'm going to have to rig up Transmission to do the RSS duty. Because of that, I decided to go the 10.5 route. Unfortunately, I had to reinstall OS X to make Spotlight work again. Try as I might, it didn't want to resume working after disabling it. Fortunately, Apple seem to have refined their software update procedure to only require two passes to fully update the system.

NTFS has been wiped from the Drobo and I'm now transferring the contents (1.5 TB) back over from Windows via gigabit ethernet. I'm using SmartSync Pro to do the transfer over SMB. The estimated transfer time is estimated at half the speed it took to backup to a WD Mybook a couple days ago. It's early though, so it will be a while before I can call this a success.

once you're going to the command line, why not btpd? it's portable, most trackers with version restrictions like it, and it's easily scriptable.

AFAIK, Transmission is totally portable. I've honestly never heard of btpd until now, which would seem to belie your assertion that it's an "approved" client, as those lists are where I hear about clients most often.

That said, what do you think it has over Transmission?

Last time I tried to build Transmission (which is probably a while ago) opting to not build GUI code was hard. btpd looks to have about the same conceptual design. If Transmission works, excellent.