What have you done with a PowerPC today?

[jktwice]

Got Chimera Linux installed on my Quad. I still need to set it up, but I felt that having a working install was a good stopping point for the day.

Definitely a laborious process compared to Adelie though.

 

[Haemoglobin]

what extensions have you added?

I added Noscript, uBlock and in a bit I'll be updating my HOSTS file.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

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

 

[Haemoglobin]

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

View attachment 2489555

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.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

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.

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

 

[mac57mac57]

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!

 

[mikas]

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.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

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

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

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.