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I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD

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Re: I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD

#11

Post by SpecialistK »

wannacboatmovie wrote: post #8
SpecialistK wrote: post #3

I respect anyone brave or foolish enough to do a drive swap on a iBook.

I've performed this procedure numerous times. While it's not particularly difficult, it requires patience - a LOT of patience. Dozens of the world's smallest Philips-head screws. The iFixit guide helps tremendously. What strikes me as nostalgic is how repairable these machines were. No proprietary screws, the HDD used a standard (at the time) form factor and interface. The batteries could even be torn down and rebuil…

Sadly I'm a below-average laptop repairman. My iBook G3 was never the same after I did it (with said guide) - much of the wrist-rest now acts as a click on the mouse and the CD drive ejection mech isn't happy. I could probably fix it with some time and effort, but I honestly never want to open it again. Kudos to you for having it down.

I too lament how closed machines have become and how it affects the environment, data recovery, and just plain ol' repair. Some of those PCI Macs with 603s, 604s and G3s could get up to G4e with CPU boards and industry-standard PCI cards (so long as they had a Mac driver.) Now you can't even add your own storage to most Macs, and the one with PCIe won't let you use your own graphics card.

Re: I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD

#12

Post by [deleted] »

wannacboatmovie wrote: post #8
SpecialistK wrote: post #3

I respect anyone brave or foolish enough to do a drive swap on a iBook.

I've performed this procedure numerous times. While it's not particularly difficult, it requires patience - a LOT of patience. Dozens of the world's smallest Philips-head screws. The iFixit guide helps tremendously. What strikes me as nostalgic is how repairable these machines were. No proprietary screws, the HDD used a standard (at the time) form factor and interface. The batteries could even be torn down and rebuil…

[deleted]

Re: I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD

#13

Post by exitb »

It's great fun to put SSDs in retro machines, but I usually opt to use SLC drives for SSD-unaware operating systems. It supposedly can have two orders of magnitude more cycles before the cells start to die. On the other hand, there's lots of conflicting information out there, so not sure if it really makes that much of a difference.

Re: I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD

#15

Post by eisa01 »

exitb wrote: post #13

It's great fun to put SSDs in retro machines, but I usually opt to use SLC drives for SSD-unaware operating systems. It supposedly can have two orders of magnitude more cycles before the cells start to die. On the other hand, there's lots of conflicting information out there, so not sure if it really makes that much of a difference.

You probably don't run 24/7 disk activity on these retro machines, so SLC is probably not worth it?

Re: I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD

#17

Post by i386 »

lloeki wrote: post #7

> Tiger’s dd doesn’t have status=progress Maybe sending it SIGINFO (^T in terminal) could help? Dunno if it's supported as far back as Tiger's. (BSD thing, it's SIGUSR1 on GNU dd / Linux, the usability difference is that on darwin the terminal can conveniently send SIGINFO via ^T)

I believe it was!

Re: I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD

#18

Post by i386 »

SpecialistK wrote: post #11
wannacboatmovie wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've performed this procedure numerous times. While it's not particularly difficult, it requires patience - a LOT of patience. Dozens of the world's smallest Philips-head screws. The iFixit guide helps tremendously. What strikes me as nostalgic is how repairable these machines were. No proprietary screws, the HDD used a standard (at the time) form factor and interface. The batteries could even be torn down and rebuil…

Sadly I'm a below-average laptop repairman. My iBook G3 was never the same after I did it (with said guide) - much of the wrist-rest now acts as a click on the mouse and the CD drive ejection mech isn't happy. I could probably fix it with some time and effort, but I honestly never want to open it again. Kudos to you for having it down. I too lament how closed machines have become and how it affects the environment, d…

There used to be a TRIM program you could install. Used one when I swapped out the super drive for an ssd in a 2012 MacBook Pro (I think at around the same time?)

Re: I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD

#20

Post by jsheard »

eisa01 wrote: post #15
exitb wrote: post #13

It's great fun to put SSDs in retro machines, but I usually opt to use SLC drives for SSD-unaware operating systems. It supposedly can have two orders of magnitude more cycles before the cells start to die. On the other hand, there's lots of conflicting information out there, so not sure if it really makes that much of a difference.

You probably don't run 24/7 disk activity on these retro machines, so SLC is probably not worth it?

Especially now that the consumer SSD market has entirely moved on to TLC and QLC, there isn't a new SLC drive you can buy for a reasonable price anymore. Even if a TLC drive would wear out more quickly in an old SSD-unaware system, they are so cheap at this point that it's not really worth worrying about.
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