Turn an old tower into my slave! Mwa ha!

Hi everybody!

I have quite a complicated setup. To cut a very long story short, 2 of my machines are an XServe G5 and a G4 MDD Dual 1.42 (You know, the one with the 4 internal drive bays)

I was wondering if there was a way to setup the Mac G4 as a permanent external Hard Drive, to add to the XServe as an external striped 2TB RAID array to host TM backups of about 10 other machines? I don't want to spend another handful of cash on another OSX Server license purely for TM backups, nor do I want to spend even more on an external drive that can hold x data. I already have all the hardware on hand and my wife won't appreciate more new computer stuff at home :x

I know about the Target Disk mode, but that isn't ideal simply because in case of power failures, the thing would boot back up into normal operation mode.

Is there a solution? Cheers and thanks!

I'm no expert (to put it mildly) but couldn't you just link the two macs by firewire then turn on Personal File Sharing on the G4? Then you could access it via Network on the G5. I'm doing this to swap files between my new imac and my old emac and it's simple and works for me.
--Richard

I agree with rglynjones idea. The other option would be to buy an enclosure, but that wouldn't satisfy your no new hardware requirement.