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What have you done with a PowerPC today?
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I had some adapter fun today. I picked up some cheap Orico doo-dads on eBay; a 120gb ssd and a 3.5 adapter along with one of my no-name, MIPRC, red pata/sata adapters. I realized that the way the ata66 port was oriented in my Graphite, the red adapter could live perfectly well stuck directly into the port and not destroy itself when closed up vs using an 80wire ultraATA lead. Anyways, a clone of the old maxtor spinner to the ssd and I have a nice upgrade to my Graphite Tiger box. The adapters are working perfectly together.
I think I will pick up a couple of the 2.5 to 3.5 adapter sleds so I can cleanly reinstall the current ssds into the sleds with the black rubber g5 feet things and Then into their respective tracks. Those sleds were cheap, maybe $6 bucks so why not
I think I will pick up a couple of the 2.5 to 3.5 adapter sleds so I can cleanly reinstall the current ssds into the sleds with the black rubber g5 feet things and Then into their respective tracks. Those sleds were cheap, maybe $6 bucks so why not
I'm planning on doing a similar upgrade to my Quicksilver, swapping out the three spinning rust drives for 1xSSD, 1x500gb sata spinning rust. Did you notice a marked speed improvement with the SSD? My friend said I should see the QS boot up significantly faster, but tbh it boots pretty darn fast already.I had some adapter fun today. I picked up some cheap Orico doo-dads on eBay; a 120gb ssd and a 3.5 adapter along with one of my no-name, MIPRC, red pata/sata adapters. I realized that the way the ata66 port was oriented in my Graphite, the red adapter could live perfectly well stuck directly into the port and not destroy itself when closed up vs using an 80wire ultraATA lead. Anyways, a clone of the old maxtor spinner to the ssd and I have a nice upgrade to my Graphite Tiger box. The adapters are working perfectly together.
I think I will pick up a couple of the 2.5 to 3.5 adapter sleds so I can cleanly reinstall the current ssds into the sleds with the black rubber g5 feet things and Then into their respective tracks. Those sleds were cheap, maybe $6 bucks so why not
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SSDs do improve app responsiveness and can improve or slow down boot speed. The mechanical platters of a spinner will never compete with the almost instant read/write speeds of SSD flash memory and with how cheap SSDs are now, if you DD an old Powermac in any way, it is an affordable and approachable upgrade for most folks. How you connect the SSD to your mac is another piece of the puzzle. Are you going to flash a PCI sata card or use a pata/sata adapter? There are additional steps if you're going to flash a PCI card but you will be rewarded with additional throughput of the PCI slot (133) vs the pata on your QS which is (ata66).
I have and use both. For my own use case, over the years I have trended towards adapters as they're cheap and easy and I still see a marked improvement in performance over the spinner. If the game is to get at that theoretical maximum and push the QS as far as it will go, a PCI card is the path forward. It depends on what you are looking to gain and how/what you use your mac for.
In my QS I use an adapter and am happy with the performance.
One other point to consider is that OSX up to Leopard does not support TRIM, so over time, (by time I mean years lol) you can experience some slower performance. This is because without the TRIM command the ssds ability to organize and manage its free space is not there and leads to slower performance up to failure. For me, I have found my happy medium in cost vs space vs performance to be the 120-128GB ssds as boot drives. Now the irony that I find amusing in this is that the ssds that have failed on me all came out of Intel macs that have TRIM. None of my 8 or so ssds in rotation in my PowerPC macs have failed or significantly slowed down on me. Anyhow I get a good chuckle out of that.
Good luck
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Objectively, I have found that booted from an SSD, my G4 Sawtooth only takes about 3 "wheel revolutions" while booting before going to desktop (this is for Tiger 10.4.11). By contrast, booting the Sawtooth from the spinner on which Sorbet is installed takes about 27 such "wheel revolutions" before going to desktop.
It is a HUGE difference, and I suspect that the slower the machine, the more pronounced the impact.
TRIM or no TRIM, it is well worth it!
It is a HUGE difference, and I suspect that the slower the machine, the more pronounced the impact.
TRIM or no TRIM, it is well worth it!
I tried, maybe 8 years ago, QS 933MHz with IDE-SATA adapter and Samsung 840, 120GB, tested it with X-bench against 300GB spinning Maxtor. I'm not sure about the scorepoints, but there are the actual speeds presented too (MB/s), and maybe, just maybe they are to be trusted, I don't know. It felt pretty fast comparing to usage under the HDD. There was a culprit though - it didn't survive sleep.
Uncached read is 28,5 times that of a Maxtor. Anything else is something like a little bit faster. Random speeds (R/W) on average 2,8x faster.
Uncached read is 28,5 times that of a Maxtor. Anything else is something like a little bit faster. Random speeds (R/W) on average 2,8x faster.
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Love the benchmarks. I too have some before and after benchmarks from my QS and my G5 iirc which is interesting because the G4 does not natively support sata where as the G5 did. I’ll have to dig them out as it’s fun to see the difference. I also have spinner raid0 vs single ssd around too which was neat.
In my own anecdotal experience specific to sata PCI cards, mine have always taken longer to boot up because (my assumption here) the g3/g4 doesn’t support natively data, so looks at ATA, then searches for the card, then finds the ssd with the boot partition. It makes boot up longer but once booted into macOS, it is very fast. I have a revb B&W that has a flashed sil3512 with Weibetech drivers that is a great example of this. Conversely, running an adaptor via ATA iirc has always beat the pci cards I have to the desktop but then has the lower theoretical maximum of ATA vs the PCI bus.
I agree 110% worth it. Fun and easy to start with an adapter and then move into flashing an appropriate pc sata card for your Powermac if that's what you want.
This is such a fun hobby
In my own anecdotal experience specific to sata PCI cards, mine have always taken longer to boot up because (my assumption here) the g3/g4 doesn’t support natively data, so looks at ATA, then searches for the card, then finds the ssd with the boot partition. It makes boot up longer but once booted into macOS, it is very fast. I have a revb B&W that has a flashed sil3512 with Weibetech drivers that is a great example of this. Conversely, running an adaptor via ATA iirc has always beat the pci cards I have to the desktop but then has the lower theoretical maximum of ATA vs the PCI bus.
I agree 110% worth it. Fun and easy to start with an adapter and then move into flashing an appropriate pc sata card for your Powermac if that's what you want.
This is such a fun hobby
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I decided to take the time to update my Tiger install to Shuriken. Currently compiling default TFFx-7400 for my graphite. I assume it will take all night so will check back in the morning.
Looking forward to playing with the sierra theme and some of the other stuff this week. I noticed part of shuriken included Mac ports for example.
Also looking to get a belkin F5D7000 installed and working. It is a v1.233 with the Broadcom chip so I have read these should be seen as native airport. I picked this up years ago in a $5 thrift store grab bag lol. Finally getting around to using it. Anyhow, Another thing to mess with this week sometime.
Looking forward to playing with the sierra theme and some of the other stuff this week. I noticed part of shuriken included Mac ports for example.
Also looking to get a belkin F5D7000 installed and working. It is a v1.233 with the Broadcom chip so I have read these should be seen as native airport. I picked this up years ago in a $5 thrift store grab bag lol. Finally getting around to using it. Anyhow, Another thing to mess with this week sometime.
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@Certificate of Excellence, is the multi-colored Apple logo shown as part of the "About this Mac" box part of Suriken? I have never seen a multi-colored logo as part of that dialog before.
@z970 , this would be a really nice add to Sorbet ... love the bold colors!
Alternately, is there something I could edit within Sorbet to make this happen? Thanks!
@z970 , this would be a really nice add to Sorbet ... love the bold colors!
Alternately, is there something I could edit within Sorbet to make this happen? Thanks!
Today, I added eSATA to my Power Mac G4 Sawtooth!
I love working inside this machine - such easy access, so nicely laid out. This picture shows the machine after the SATA card is installed, but before the SATA to eSATA adapter is installed. If you look really carefully you may be able to spot at least two of the HDD spinners and possibly the third one (there are three HDDs in the machine) plus one small SSD immediately to the left of the two spinners that are readily visible, already connected via the SATA card:
The SATA card I used is a completely generic PCI-X SATA card purchased on eBay (the eBay listing for the card explicitly stated Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5 support):
The SATA to eSATA adapter I used was equally generic and also from eBay:
and the net result, with it all installed, looks like this (disk controller cables unplugged and pushed off to the side to provide better visuals of the SATA and eSATA equipment) :
The SATA card is the leftmost one in the expansion slot area; the SATA to eSATA adapter is second from right in the same area.
The whole thing works like a champ! I am hosting an internal SSD and two external eSATA ports with this arrangement, with a 500 GB eSATA-interfaced G-Tech Q-Drive connected to one of the two eSATA ports the adapter presents.
I have benchmarked disk transfer speeds with this arrangement, and it is averaging 35 Mbps in a disk-to-disk transfer, where the source is the SSD and the destination is the external eSATA interfaced Q-Drive. I thought this seemed a tad slow (I am used to 120 Mbps transfer rates with eSATA on my G5s) but then I tested transfer speeds between two of the three spinners also in the Sawtooth and it was the same... roughly 35 Mbps. This seems to be the maximum disk transfer speed for this box.
So, mission accomplished!
I love working inside this machine - such easy access, so nicely laid out. This picture shows the machine after the SATA card is installed, but before the SATA to eSATA adapter is installed. If you look really carefully you may be able to spot at least two of the HDD spinners and possibly the third one (there are three HDDs in the machine) plus one small SSD immediately to the left of the two spinners that are readily visible, already connected via the SATA card:
The SATA card I used is a completely generic PCI-X SATA card purchased on eBay (the eBay listing for the card explicitly stated Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5 support):
The SATA to eSATA adapter I used was equally generic and also from eBay:
and the net result, with it all installed, looks like this (disk controller cables unplugged and pushed off to the side to provide better visuals of the SATA and eSATA equipment) :
The SATA card is the leftmost one in the expansion slot area; the SATA to eSATA adapter is second from right in the same area.
The whole thing works like a champ! I am hosting an internal SSD and two external eSATA ports with this arrangement, with a 500 GB eSATA-interfaced G-Tech Q-Drive connected to one of the two eSATA ports the adapter presents.
I have benchmarked disk transfer speeds with this arrangement, and it is averaging 35 Mbps in a disk-to-disk transfer, where the source is the SSD and the destination is the external eSATA interfaced Q-Drive. I thought this seemed a tad slow (I am used to 120 Mbps transfer rates with eSATA on my G5s) but then I tested transfer speeds between two of the three spinners also in the Sawtooth and it was the same... roughly 35 Mbps. This seems to be the maximum disk transfer speed for this box.
So, mission accomplished!
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Up until about a couple years ago I had a G3 B&W with this configuration. I was using it as a file server. When I got the Mac, I also purchased a 2TB Fantom Drives RAID enclosure. This enclosure (which is still active, but connected to another Mac now) has FW400, dual FW800, USB2 and eSATA.
I was flooding the FW400 bus though, so I needed another route. Since the enclosure had eSATA and I had a PCI-SATA card already, I just went with the adapter. Worked just fine for years. Glad to see it all worked out for you!
This is what I've done with a PowerPC very recently. Converted a G4 iMac into a functional external display.
Regular readers/posters here may recall my fondness for these amazing machines.
In recent years Apple appear to have lost that 'magic touch' of creating a computer to 'take one's breath away.' Not only did Jony Ive receive the Designer of the Year Award for the G4 iMac, but it’s also on permanent display in several prestigious Modern Art and Science Museums. (Ditto for the G4 Cube).
During the years that I've been collecting interesting Macs, I’ve often regretted that Apple have never launched an updated version of the G4 iMac ''Sunflower" as Steve Jobs so eloquently named it, and to which he added in 2002, "It's a technological tour de force!". No wonder it has to be my all-time favourite.
Some Apple geeks with far more knowledge than myself have shoe-horned the latest tiny Mac Mini inside the G4 Sunflower domed base. I took an easier approach and after removal of the original logic board, I installed a new Juicy Crumb Docklite Board, wonderfully designed and marketed by the Australian start-up who’s mission is to save many interesting computers from being trashed. This effectively turns the iMac’s excellent LCD flat panel screen into an external display.
In fact I found out about this project almost by accident after I'd advertised my 20" G4 iMac for sale, which I'd complertely refurbished with maxed-out RAM, an SSD and fresh install of OSX 10.5.9 Sorbet Leopard. As the 20" version has now become rare, the buyer was so keen to find one, he made a 6hr round trip for the purchase. Apparently it wasn't my upgrade which interested him, his idea was to transform it into a monitor with a new Juicy Crumb Docklite logic board and internally install the latest M4 Mac Mini.
As already mentioned, my approach was simpler. In the photos below the 17" iMac is harnessed to an out-of-sight MacMini M2Pro which can run the latest and future Apple OS's. And the performance with the original LCD flat panel screen and Harman Kardon speakers is still remarkeable!
One other 'icing on the cake' feature of this mod is that there's no 'burchery' involved with cutting or destruction of orginal components. No soldering either.
Kudos also to Dosdude1 for the Juicy Crumb software assistance, especially the facility to change the screen brightness from a menu bar icon, an addition that I find particularly useful.
And with a screenshot:
Regular readers/posters here may recall my fondness for these amazing machines.
In recent years Apple appear to have lost that 'magic touch' of creating a computer to 'take one's breath away.' Not only did Jony Ive receive the Designer of the Year Award for the G4 iMac, but it’s also on permanent display in several prestigious Modern Art and Science Museums. (Ditto for the G4 Cube).
During the years that I've been collecting interesting Macs, I’ve often regretted that Apple have never launched an updated version of the G4 iMac ''Sunflower" as Steve Jobs so eloquently named it, and to which he added in 2002, "It's a technological tour de force!". No wonder it has to be my all-time favourite.
Some Apple geeks with far more knowledge than myself have shoe-horned the latest tiny Mac Mini inside the G4 Sunflower domed base. I took an easier approach and after removal of the original logic board, I installed a new Juicy Crumb Docklite Board, wonderfully designed and marketed by the Australian start-up who’s mission is to save many interesting computers from being trashed. This effectively turns the iMac’s excellent LCD flat panel screen into an external display.
In fact I found out about this project almost by accident after I'd advertised my 20" G4 iMac for sale, which I'd complertely refurbished with maxed-out RAM, an SSD and fresh install of OSX 10.5.9 Sorbet Leopard. As the 20" version has now become rare, the buyer was so keen to find one, he made a 6hr round trip for the purchase. Apparently it wasn't my upgrade which interested him, his idea was to transform it into a monitor with a new Juicy Crumb Docklite logic board and internally install the latest M4 Mac Mini.
As already mentioned, my approach was simpler. In the photos below the 17" iMac is harnessed to an out-of-sight MacMini M2Pro which can run the latest and future Apple OS's. And the performance with the original LCD flat panel screen and Harman Kardon speakers is still remarkeable!
One other 'icing on the cake' feature of this mod is that there's no 'burchery' involved with cutting or destruction of orginal components. No soldering either.
Kudos also to Dosdude1 for the Juicy Crumb software assistance, especially the facility to change the screen brightness from a menu bar icon, an addition that I find particularly useful.
And with a screenshot:
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Photo is screenshot from my 17-inch Core2Duo iMac. What is it doing here in the PPC forum? I installed 10.5 Server on my Powermac G5 (not in the photo), and am logged into my G5 on a network account with my iMac.
I knew about OS X Server since it launched in the late '90s, but this is one piece of Apple tech I never got around to playing with. But I have a small collection of G5s and early iMacs, so why not? Configuring it to run as a network login server with auto mount network home directories wasn't difficult, but it's one of those cases of getting into the manuals. I bought 10.5 edition of the book "Mac OS X Server Essentials". There isn't much documentation online, and Apple seems to have pulled all of the online resources for 10.5 Server.
The main difficulty was that I wasn't able to authenticate on a 10.5 Server with a client computer running 10.6. Maybe there's a way, but I just downgraded my iMac to 10.5, and it authenticated without any issues.
I think the next step will be to make a HD image of my iMac, then attempt to network boot it from my G5 server. To be running a completely diskless client.
It would be fun and slightly educational to build a vintage Macintosh workgroup LAN with OS X Servers and clients.
I knew about OS X Server since it launched in the late '90s, but this is one piece of Apple tech I never got around to playing with. But I have a small collection of G5s and early iMacs, so why not? Configuring it to run as a network login server with auto mount network home directories wasn't difficult, but it's one of those cases of getting into the manuals. I bought 10.5 edition of the book "Mac OS X Server Essentials". There isn't much documentation online, and Apple seems to have pulled all of the online resources for 10.5 Server.
The main difficulty was that I wasn't able to authenticate on a 10.5 Server with a client computer running 10.6. Maybe there's a way, but I just downgraded my iMac to 10.5, and it authenticated without any issues.
I think the next step will be to make a HD image of my iMac, then attempt to network boot it from my G5 server. To be running a completely diskless client.
It would be fun and slightly educational to build a vintage Macintosh workgroup LAN with OS X Servers and clients.
Oh neat, what is the pata pci card you have installed in your sawtooth? I have a number of them from ata 33 through 100 but none work in osx unfortunately.
The ATM rainbow apple is not part of Shuriken or Sorbet but is very easy to customize & change in Tiger if you are so inclined. I made a video about it a couple years ago.
Instant YouTube fame.
Oh neat, what is the pata pci card you have installed in your sawtooth? I have a number of them from ata 33 through 100 but none work in osx unfortunately.
The ATM rainbow apple is not part of Shuriken or Sorbet but is very easy to customize & change in Tiger if you are so inclined. I made a video about it a couple years ago.
Instant YouTube fame.
Hi! Thanks for the video!
I purchased the below card from eBay:
Attachments
Well, compiling TFFx for this graphite took about a day LOL - Posting from it now. @mac57mac57, heres the icon if you want to use it.
Thanks, @Certificate of Excellence, I applied the instructions in your video, which was for Tiger, to Sorbet Leopard and it worked equally well.
I used a different Apple logo than you did (thanks for including it though!), one that I snagged from a presentation Apple did years ago, where the logo used was on screen long enough to get the Apple cognoscenti quite excited about the possibility of a revised Apple logo. That never happened, but I kept the logo - I liked it - figuring I would use it one day. Today, it appears, is that day!
One reboot later and the "About This Mac" dialog, from Sorbet on my G4 Sawtooth, looks like the below (I absolutely love the addition of color to this otherwise monochromatic dialog box!):
For those of you who might want it, the original logo file, 700x700, is also attached. I used Photoshop to size reduce it to 88x88 and then overlay it onto the existing Apple logo in the Resources section of the Sorbet loginwindow.app file (Show Package Contents, Contents, Resources, MacOSX.tiff).
The card that provides those blue PATA connectors? I don't know! It was there when I received the machine (it was a donation from a fellow employee who knew of my interest in vintage Macs), and has always worked well. I have never had cause to examine it!
I used a different Apple logo than you did (thanks for including it though!), one that I snagged from a presentation Apple did years ago, where the logo used was on screen long enough to get the Apple cognoscenti quite excited about the possibility of a revised Apple logo. That never happened, but I kept the logo - I liked it - figuring I would use it one day. Today, it appears, is that day!
One reboot later and the "About This Mac" dialog, from Sorbet on my G4 Sawtooth, looks like the below (I absolutely love the addition of color to this otherwise monochromatic dialog box!):
For those of you who might want it, the original logo file, 700x700, is also attached. I used Photoshop to size reduce it to 88x88 and then overlay it onto the existing Apple logo in the Resources section of the Sorbet loginwindow.app file (Show Package Contents, Contents, Resources, MacOSX.tiff).
The card that provides those blue PATA connectors? I don't know! It was there when I received the machine (it was a donation from a fellow employee who knew of my interest in vintage Macs), and has always worked well. I have never had cause to examine it!
Oh wow that is very pretty
I like that alot. I have never seen that Apple before. What a neat story behind it too. Yep, I used a purple apple for my Sorbet install considering the Sorbet theme coloring used.
Happy to confirm that what I read about the rev1 f5d7000s is accurate - I installed the card in my graphite & Tiger found it immediately & connected to my WiFi.
Since I had the box open on my bench, I retested three ata 33/66/100 pci cards I’ve had for ages (hoping one might work) but none of them were recognized in osx unfortunately. I can think of quite a few fun things I could do with them from pata to msata adapters to pata to CF reader etc. but that’ll have to wait for another time I suppose. I wonder if there are drivers out there for these that could convince osx to be friends. My gut thinks not but I hold out hope.
I was digging around in my parts box and found another sil3512 so I’ll flash that with the Weibetech flashing tool for osx. I don’t remember where this one came from lol but was a welcome [re?] discovery
Follow up to my last post above, running OS X Server 10.5 on my late 2005 Powermac DC G5. I managed to create a network bootable disk image on my 17-inch iMac. I then used that image to simultaneously boot both my 2006 Intel iMacs as diskless network clients off of a PowerPC G5.
OS X Server is an interesting piece of software. It obviously didn't make much sense as a consumer product, but I can see the utility of being able to network boot a lab full "diskless" of iMacs or do centralized management of multiple Macs. I also got the email server running on my Apple Intranet and can send emails between network accounts. Obviously, won't be putting this online, and I'm using a wired LAN with an old Airport as the hub. My Powermac server has been up several days now without any issues. It's a reliable piece of software when used correctly.
Now I'm playing with xgrid to try running some distributed batch jobs across the network.
OS X Server is an interesting piece of software. It obviously didn't make much sense as a consumer product, but I can see the utility of being able to network boot a lab full "diskless" of iMacs or do centralized management of multiple Macs. I also got the email server running on my Apple Intranet and can send emails between network accounts. Obviously, won't be putting this online, and I'm using a wired LAN with an old Airport as the hub. My Powermac server has been up several days now without any issues. It's a reliable piece of software when used correctly.
Now I'm playing with xgrid to try running some distributed batch jobs across the network.
Love the G-Tech external drive! Those things were such a beautiful aesthetic match with the Power Mac G5 cases. What capacity is it?
Back in 2006 when I got my Power Mac G5 DP, I bought two of these G-Tech drives, 250 GB each, to provide a fast and simple, and rotating on-site / off-site, backup mechanism for the 250 GB HDD that came with the G5.
I still have both drives (and the G5!) and they both still work well. I have had several G-Tech drives fail on me, but these two have been super solid.
Such a neat use of hardware. I’m going to give this a shot.
Mine is 500 GB. I originally bought it in 2008 as a Time Machine backup drive for my 20-inch iMac (in the picture left). Now it just sits on my G5 and contains all my ISO images, Downloaded app installers, and a few movies. My G5 has 2TB and a 500 GB internal disks. The 500 GB disk has Server installed on it. The other 2 TB drive has a normal installation of 10.5 Leopard.