What have you done with a PowerPC today?

[Amethyst1]

I think next I will install a spinner so I can see what advantage going to mSata -drive had.

QuickBench/Xbench don't measure random access time, which is where SSDs totally obliterate any spinner. So they're not painting the full picture.

The OWC disk pretty much tops at less than 75MB/s averages being in the 36-53 MB/s region. I had not before benchmarked SSD in FW bus and was quite surpriced by this. Expected it to be a bit better. But, its quite obvious the FW bus limits the top speed.

FireWire 800 is 786 Mbit/s max (so they're rounding up here) which translates to 78 MB/s due to 8b/10b encoding. So 75 MB/s max is quite good, but the averages are quite low for an SSD.

 

[ToniCH]

Ok, so I plugged an Apple (Samsung HD103SI) 1TB spinner into the G5. According to Quickbench sequential reads are quite good, it tops at 112 MB/s and averages at 80MB/s. Sequential writes are even better: max 126MB/s and average 86MB/s. But random reads and writes are horrible, we are talking like single digits in small files, better in large files like 53MB/s random writes and 75MB/s random writes. They average at 17 and 29 MB/s.

So, obviously access times are better for the mSata and also random reads and writes are super fast compared to the spinner.

Its quite all right for a data disk and occasional photo editing I guess. The OWC SSD would probably be very nice if installed into the internal SATA bus. Maybe I'll test it next to see if it improves on averages vs. when installed to FW box.

 

[Amethyst1]

But random reads and writes are horrible, we are talking like single digits in small files [...]

And since this is what happens when booting an OS and launching applications, spinners absolutely suck for that.

 

[ToniCH]

And since this is what happens when booting an OS and launching applications, spinners absolutely suck for that.

And that is why the mSata or any other SSD is my choice of boot/application disk. In the G5 too.

 

[ToniCH]

Here is the final comparison. All disks tested in the 2005 G5 internal SATA bus. Its funny, the dirt cheap Dogfish mSata (my G5 boot disk) has faster transfer speeds in the internal SATA bus than the expensive OWC 6G SATA3 SSD.

Ps. I earlier wrote that the mSata is installed with an Delock brand adapter but that is not true. I misremembered. The actual adapter used is a no name chinese one.

 

[Amethyst1]

Its funny, the dirt cheap Dogfish mSata (my G5 boot disk) has faster transfer speeds in the internal SATA bus than the expensive OWC 6G SATA3 SSD.

OWC’s products are somewhat overpriced.

Ps. I earlier wrote that the mSata is installed with an Delock brand adapter but that is not true. I misremembered. The actual adapter used is a no name chinese one.

You could also have gone for a standard 2.5” SSD in the G5. Any particular reason to go for mSATA?

 

[ToniCH]

OWC’s products are somewhat overpriced.


You could also have gone for a standard 2.5” SSD in the G5. Any particular reason to go for mSATA?

Luckily I recently bought a box of Mac goodies from our local "graigslist" kind of thing. Pic below. All that for 47€ incl. postage. Came with OWC invoice/receipt which was dated 2 years back. 👍🏻

Why mSata? I actually did go with the normal Sata SSD originally, the OWC was in there few days ago but then I thought of the mSatas. I have several in shelf which are meant for my vintage machines. I had trouble getting my Cube to boot from several normal SATA SSD's recently and ordered a bunch of cheap replacements + pile of different adapters which I thought could work in both G4 and G5 machines. So I just chose one and put it into the G5 to see if it works. And it does. I could just leave the OWC SSD (1TB) in there as the only drive and use the mSata (256GB) elsewhere. But, I really don't have need for that much drive space in the G5, I don't plan to use it all the time and data can be in my server too. Haven't completely decided what to do about it yet. Lets see.

Next step is to try to flash the new GPUs to it. EDIT: and get the wifi working somehow.

The box of goodies. All unused except the Jetdrive which was used briefly as a backup drive.

 

[ToniCH]

Hahaa!! Success! 😁 I found an old Bearextender 802.11n USB -thing in my parts bin. I remember buying it at some time in 2010-11 or something. And soon after it became obsolete. So, I thought there is a chance it was an older product at that time. After going through many google links I managed to find a driver and it works! Now I have wifi. Not as elegant as internal card but at least it works. 😎

Weirdly it appears as USB Ethernet in the Network tab.

EDIT: Here cometh my 1st piece of written text in the internet with a G5 in almost 20 years. This sentence here, written using TenFourFox and a late 2005 G5!

 

[MarkC426]

I've done this with my 2010 MBA and an external display so that I could enjoy arcade games with vertical monitors as they'd been intended. First in clamshell mode and later by just switching the white menu bar.

I have just never seen a laptop physically turned 90 degrees like an iPad before....
You live and learn.

 

[Amethyst1]

I have just never seen a laptop physically turned 90 degrees like an iPad before....
You live and learn.

Ahem…

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

My revB B&W has been acting bonkers, crashing and KPing all over the place. My initial plan was to use this mac as part of the 2023 PPC challenge but it has become more a lets fix it n get the demon possession out. I lumped this in with general maintenance, so I reseated PCI cards and SDRam, cleaned and repasted the CPU. I picked up a neat NOS tiny cpu fan at the local thrift for $1.00 NIB, so threw that on the CPU heatsink, pulled the suspect 7000 out for reflashing & installed the OG Rage128, and reset PRAM. I also swapped out the boot S3 SSD for another and also swapped in some storage in the form of a Sata 80gb spinner.

All in all, the box is much happier now and I have begun to use it for mundane tasks where fun is the priority and speed unecessary. I still plan on getting the 7000 back in the box for a snappier GUI but it needs some work before I get it slotted back in.

I noticed how hot the SDRAM and other components get in this elderly box, so am considering some additional heatsinks for aging componentry and maybe some bondi blue (that would look neat I think) or aluminum heatsinks for the ram sticks.

 

[theMarble]

Today I got the RAID0 array working on my G5. For those who haven't seen my post here recently, it was meant to be made up of 2 Kingston A400 240GB SSDs, however one of the disks was not being detected internally. After some fiddling, I decided to use a SanDisk SSD of the same capacity to replace it. I know that mixing brands is probably not the greatest thing to do, but I don't rely on this G5 for any important so I'm fine with it.

I also used Interface Builder to remake the HUD About this Mac window, it was originally made over on macthemes.net, but the Wayback Machine didn't backup the download. This goes best with the Black Mac OS X theme for Leopard

 

[Amethyst1]

I also used Interface Builder to remake the HUD About this Mac window, it was originally made over on macthemes.net, but the Wayback Machine didn't backup the download. This goes best with the Black Mac OS X theme for Leopard

Is it possible to make the two buttons black as well?

 

[theMarble]

Is it possible to make the two buttons black as well?

If I could work out how to decompile and recompile SArtFile.bin and ArtFile.bin, then yes. However, since all push buttons are drawn from the same image file, it would make every single one in the OS black as well.

Secondly, I'm not sure if there are any ThemePark versions for PPC Leopard floating around anymore, without it I'm not sure there is any way to decompile those files.

 

[mectojic]

Today I cleaned up my G4 Sawtooth internet setup dramatically. Until now I had been using the Airport card for OS9, and an Airport Extreme PCI card in OSX. This works, but I wanted something faster and better.

I installed a Gigabit Ethernet card with the 8169 chipset, and to make it wireless, plugged it into a VONETS Wifi bridge, which powers itself via USB. MacOS detects the connection as ethernet. This allowed me to eradicate the Airport PCI card and the Airport card entirely. I don't really bother with speed testing, but server file transfers are much faster now than Airport Extreme.

There is some confusion about which gigabit cards work in MacOS9, because most don't. After some browsing of old forums, I chose this card, Trendnet TEG-PCITXR, which works great. The box itself only supplies Windows drivers, but you can get OS9 drivers on EveryMac; OSX works out of the box.

 

[ToniCH]

Acquired a PC-machine, flashed a X1900GT for my G5. It went smoothly per instructions on the forum and it now works!

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

I thought it was cool having the G3 powermac case displayed while I had it out and was working on it last week, so connected it to my gaming pc monitor with the G3 side panel and blue lever/apple facing outward, displaying that graphic that I rarely see. I think that looks pretty cool

Long live my cranky B&W rev B.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Old spinner in my iBookg4 died so I stuck in the Samsung SSD (32gb) from my dead 12” PowerBook. Not too bad of a job but certainly a lot of screws and janky plastics lol - all in about 30 minutes worth of time.

Booting up fine although I think I’m going to stick sorbet over the Leopard install in there now.

 

[Doq]

Four days in, got a working Gentoo install on the KING, the A1139, preparing for a several-weeks-late entry into the PowerPC Challenge.

More on this later

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

Gentoo rules..!
How long it takes to compile kernel on this machine?

 

[mortlocli]

Tried a new way of setting up a laptop or desktop as a monitor for a raspberry pi using only a standard network cable as a connection. I was using my ibook..but though it stated there was a connection made it wasn't working. One prob that can occur with older mac is a firewall block of port 443, but that wasn't a factor in my setup.
Links to this process are here:

Use your desktop or laptop screen and keyboard with your Pi - Raspberry Pi

Meltwater has come up with a nice little trick which allows you to use your laptop or desktop’s display and keyboard as the display and keyboard for your Pi. You won’t need to do any soldering or to buy any special equipment: all you need is a network cable. You’ll be using the network port […]

www.raspberrypi.com

Guide To…Direct Network Connection

UPDATE – March 2017 Raspberry Pi Remote Connections – Without A Network! No keyboard or screen available for your Raspberry Pi, but you have a laptop? There is now a very easy solution…

pihw.wordpress.com

Not sure if anyone else has succeeded in trying this..maybe a no go with PPC machines?

 

[Amethyst1]

Tried a new way of setting up a laptop or desktop as a monitor for a raspberry pi using only a standard network cable as a connection. I was using my ibook..but though it stated there was a connection made it wasn't working.

What didn’t work? SSH or X11 forwarding?

 

[Doq]

Gentoo rules..!
How long it takes to compile kernel on this machine?

I'd say about an hour or two or three for a manually configured kernel? I haven't actually timed it but it's not completely disastrous. Genkernel takes much longer.

 

[mortlocli]

What didn’t work? SSH or X11 forwarding?

Im fairly ignorant on network matters, Ame...but I think its using Bonjour via SSH.

The tut is a bit sketchy in some places and Id like to see a youtube bout how it all fits together...like if the connection is there your Rpi desktop just suddenly pops up on your laptop screen???

Just wondered if any other PPC owners had travelled this road..successfully...or not.

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

@Doq
I've got a habit to use time command when starting some big emerge .