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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

#31

Post by tempoponet »

AltruisticGapHN wrote: post #27

I put an SSD in a MacBook pro late 2009 and I love it! I installed Windows 10 and Ubuntu 22.04. I tried compiling my website with a php/apache and a mariadb containers in docker. I thought that maybe Vite would take forever to compile but no it ran almost the same as my current PC. I was really amazed at how well it all still runs. The main lag I noticed is when you move from page to page the Vite server takes up to…

I also put an SSD in my 2009 MBP - in 2011! It was $500 for a 256gb drive and it was worth every penny.

Even though that drive is slow and expensive by today's standards, I don't know if it ever really bottlenecked the system. The 8gb ram ultimately couldn't keep up with hungry chrome tabs and electron apps of the mid 2010's.

Re: I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD

#33

Post by pocketsand »

RogerPollack wrote: post #26

This is not an easy task. For those of you that don’t know the iBook G4’s logic board and hard drive are essential hermetically sealed in the plastic case AND a second layer of metal. I ruined my first iBook G4 when attempting this same upgrade as the ribbon cables that connect the power button and LEDs ripped in half from age (very brittle). I bought another used iBook G4. It still has the stock 60 GB hard disk and…

I hosed an iBook G4 repairing a hard drive back in the day. Oops

Re: I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD

#35

Post by drewzero1 »

AltruisticGapHN wrote: post #27

I put an SSD in a MacBook pro late 2009 and I love it! I installed Windows 10 and Ubuntu 22.04. I tried compiling my website with a php/apache and a mariadb containers in docker. I thought that maybe Vite would take forever to compile but no it ran almost the same as my current PC. I was really amazed at how well it all still runs. The main lag I noticed is when you move from page to page the Vite server takes up to…

Lucky on the battery.. ours started swelling after about 7-8 years of heavy use, and made the trackpad click by itself. I think I also had to replace the display cable and one of the ram slots stopped working. Other than that it was a solid computer for about 10 years until we replaced it with a 2012 model, still in use.

Re: I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD

#36

Post by thesuitonym »

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 need to commit this to memory, I often forget to send stats=progress to dd. Thanks for the tip!

Re: I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD

#37

Post by snowwrestler »

I had one of these white plastic iBook G4s. My next laptop was the very first “unibody” MacBook Pro 15”, bought from a Thanksgiving sale in 2008. I upgraded the RAM to 8GB and the HD to an SSD and it still runs great today. I stopped trying to upgrade the OS so the biggest challenge now is security. Thankfully Firefox has a long-term-stable version that still runs and gets current root certs for TLS.

Re: I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD

#38

Post by RogerPollack »

pocketsand wrote: post #33
RogerPollack wrote: post #26

This is not an easy task. For those of you that don’t know the iBook G4’s logic board and hard drive are essential hermetically sealed in the plastic case AND a second layer of metal. I ruined my first iBook G4 when attempting this same upgrade as the ribbon cables that connect the power button and LEDs ripped in half from age (very brittle). I bought another used iBook G4. It still has the stock 60 GB hard disk and…

I hosed an iBook G4 repairing a hard drive back in the day. Oops

It is easily done. The IFIXIT guide mentions it for anyone interested.

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iBook+G4+12-Inch+800+MHz-1.2+GH...

"The connectors at the ends of the cables are attached very firmly to the sockets on the logic board. Pulling directly on the cable will either separate the cable from its connector or the socket from the logic board."

Re: I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD

#39

Post by bluedino »

SpecialistK wrote: post #3

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

I remember the first RAM/HD upgrade I did on a Unibody MacBook...mind-blowing simple. Most laptops were such a pain to work on before that.

Edit: I remember some models having the drive in a bay and the RAM in an easily accessible panel (or under the keyboard), but most were a sandwich of tiny panels and cables.

Re: I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD

#40

Post by jsheard »

ndiddy wrote: post #30
jsheard wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it’s worth worrying about on an iBook. The hard drive is in between the motherboard and the palmrest, so replacing it basically involves taking the entire machine completely apart (including having to deal with a ton of really tight snap points). It’s definitely not something you want to do more than once, and I’m not sure how many disassembly cycles the 20 year old plastic can take.

If you do want some insurance, the old over-provisioning trick should still work to prolong the life of the drive when used in a system that doesn't support TRIM. Format the drive on a modern system that does support TRIM, or secure erase it with the manufacturers utility, then create a partition which doesn't fill the entire drive and use that on the classic system that doesn't support TRIM. As long as the system never writes to the unpartitioned area it will remain in the TRIMed state and allow the SSD controller to use it as slack space.
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