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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

#51

Post by Uvix »

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…

Tomb Raider Anniversary is from 2007. I wouldn't count it as an indication of how capable the GPU still is.

Re: I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD

#52

Post by UncleSlacky »

snowwrestler wrote: post #37

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.

Just install a modern Linux, that's what I did with my 2012 unibody MBP (which I'm typing this reply on).

Re: I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD

#53

Post by UncleSlacky »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #50
snowwrestler wrote: post #37

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.

Those things are tanks. It really frustrates me that Apple stops updating the OS after 5 to 7 years.

Linux runs great on them, at least.

Re: I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD

#54

Post by jwells89 »

marban wrote: post #14

I maxed out my G4 Cube with an SSD, ATI card and a Sonnet Encore CPU to push it to 1.25Ghz — To this date still my most inspiring machine and just lovely for the occasional ReBirth session.

The G4 desktops are all pretty cool machines. One of these days I’d like to get ahold of a Quicksilver/MDD motherboard and see if I can figure out a way to fit it into a modern ATX case. The original tower cases were neat but not great in the airflow or noise departments, and with a growing number of G4 original PSUs failing it’s useful to be able to house a standard ATX PSU without case hacks.

Re: I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD

#55

Post by jwells89 »

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?

Particularly if you’re running OS 9 or older Classic Mac OS, as it barely does anything that isn’t user-initiated, which naturally means a lot less disk activity.

Re: I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD

#56

Post by [deleted] »

jsheard wrote: post #40
ndiddy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ne…

[deleted]

Re: I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD

#57

Post by ndiddy »

jsheard wrote: post #40
ndiddy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ne…

Great tip, I haven't heard of that before.

Re: I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD

#58

Post by speedgoose »

_joel wrote: post #47
pseudocomposer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you start comparing the bandwidth/speed of that RAM and SSD, at least…

Indeed, you fill it up even quicker nowadays.

I don't know. The iBook G4 had DDR 333 MHz PC2700 at best. The modern SSD of a Macbook M3 is about twice as fast in GB/s (2.5GB/s vs 5GB/s). The latency is likely worse, but at the same time the M3 has much bigger L1 and L2 caches (192KB*8 vs 64KB, and 16MB vs 512KB).

Re: I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD

#59

Post by WoodenChair »

I recently did a similar set of upgrades. I wanted to create a Mac OS 9 computer for my son. So, I bought three untested G4 Mac minis (Late 2005) after learning that there is now a version of Mac OS 9 that has been hacked to run on them:

http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?board=127.0

When they shipped they were Mac OS X only. They are actually, with this hack, some of the fastest machines you can get to run Mac OS 9.

Anyway, I cleaned them, installed SSDs, changed the clock batteries, and maxed out the RAM on all three of them. I'm keeping the fastest 1.5 Ghz one for my son and the other two (1.25, 1.33) I thought I might keep as backups but I guess I'll just sell them on eBay since now I'm comfortable enough working in these that I think I could fix his pretty easily if anything went wrong.

Re: I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD

#60

Post by johnklos »

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.

Yeah - I've killed several "fancy" Samsung SSDs due to spending lots of time in swap. One might think a 25 MHz VAX SOC (VAXstation 4000/30) with 24 megs of memory wouldn't be able to do I/Os fast enough to kill a modern SSD within the span of several years, but one would be wrong :)
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