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.