RAID-5 on a G4

I should probably file this under "Don't try this at home", but I really admire the chutzpah of the author of this article on hacking a RAID-5 setup. The author bought a RAID card which is only supposed to work in an Xserve running OS X Server and installed it in his old G4 tower running the regular Mac OS X. I in fact was wondering about this setup a year ago--could I use an old G4 to serve files from a RAID 5 array. I never figured it out, but this article at least make me feel like I wasn't crazy for thinking about it.

RAID 5 is so great because it has a very efficient way of providing redundant information that can be used if a single drive fails. RAID 1 does this too, but it basically consists of two drives that are duplicates of each other. So with RAID 1, you get to use 50% of the storage you pay for. RAID 5 works with a group of disks with one disk holding parity information. So in the case of this article the RAID had 4 drives with one drive storing parity information. In this scenario you get to use 75% of the storage that you pay for. If any drive fails, then you haven't lost any data. If you want to know more about RAID, I heard this is supposed to be a good primer on RAID setups at DV.com (registration required).

For PCI-X and PCI-E Mac there are more option for a RAID-5 setup. I gave up on a RAID-5 server because I figured out that regular Macs can't reliably serve video files over regular ethernet, which is what I wanted to do with my G4 RAID-5 setup.

BTW, HardMac is a translated version of a French website. They try out some cool stuff--they're about to publish an article where they are testing out an 8-processor setup on a Mac.