On my PC's if I have a hardware problem, normally the
part can be replaced and back up and running the same day.(No, I haven't had
the time to properly research this yet!) If it was justifiable and needed,
I would work towards obtaining a G5 10.3 OS(Panther) system. I could build
more then a couple awesome PC's though for the amount of cash I would need
to outlay to do this.
As others have already said, Macs do use a number of standard PC parts nowadays. Apple's website has all the details you need there. Just note that the PCI slots on the lower-end G5s are 3.3V: 5V cards won't fit (as I found out when I tried transplanting my PC's SCSI card across).
Is it like Linux where different drives or partitions simply havedifferent directory names?
I don't know if it is like Linux. Each hard drive can be called anything
it likes. I have two hard drives in my Blue and White G3, one with two
partitions. The latter is called Minnie and Duki, and the other drive is
called PS Scratch. Minnie has 10.3 on, and Duki has 9.1 on.
FYI Mac OS X is heavily based on... one of the BSD variants, I think. So it therefore has similarities to Linux, "under the hood". On Unix-like OSes, you can mount a partition anywhere you like within your filesystem. To the user there is no distinction between physical hardware devices: it's all just one big directory structure. This can be extremely powerful from an administrative point of view, and is something I've taken advantage of in the past when I had a multitude of smallish drives in my server.
By default, Mac OS X is a little unusual in that it approaches the situation in both ways at once. The filesystem, being Unix-ish, just mounts the partition under /Volumes, but the desktop shows a separate icon. The mount point is given the volume name you gave the partition (so in my case it's /Volumes/Photo/). But as a user I don't see any of that: the desktop just shows me another icon - so it's closer to Windows (or earlier Mac OS versions) in that respect.
Cheers,
- Dave
http://www.digistar.com/~dmann/
