Just curious if anyone has had any experience with the Sonnet Jive add-on for the Powermac G5?

Sonnet - G5 Jive: Internal Drive Mounting System for Power Mac G5

It looks all well and good, however I am concerned about the fact that it sits in front of the CPU fans, which I imagine would block off a good deal of circulation. As G5's run quite hot to begin with I am not sure if it is a wise move and would like to get some feedback on other users experience's if possible.

And how is the little beast treating you?

I can tell you from experience it's never once been a particularly quiet machine, and I'd be hesitant about putting something in the way of the air-flow, as this will likely cause the fans to spin up to high RPM a lot more often.

FYI: when I looked at adding more storage to it, the more flexible/safer solution seemed to be a PCI-X card (Sonnet/Firmtek/LaCie at the low end or Highpoint/CalDigit/G-Technology at the high end) and using some combination of Mini-SAS/Port Multiplier/Multilane Infiniband, and an external enclosure (most of the above can provide both, using varying combinations of the mentioend technologies).

The biggest issue for me always came back to the issue of drive management. If you want to combine the drives but don't want to use Software RAID, the card to do it is gonna be pricey. Hopefully when SL is out with ZFS this will be much less of an issue for those of us who don't actually need all the features of hardware RAID.

Thanks for the feedback Coxy.

The machine is going well Pengu. I can tell you never really cleaned it out though. Before I even turned it on I spent about 2 hours cleaning out all the dust. Especially from the graphic card, I had to dismantle the heat sink and fan combo on it to clear half the junk out :P

Overall the machine has given a nice speed bump over my old MDD G4 which is now being turned into a server project of sorts. Thanks again.

Sorry about that. It did get a brief clean a few months ago, but due to the whole cheese grater thing it basically sucks dust in whenever it's on..

No stress mate, was a good chance for me to familiarise myself with its guts :P