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Pimp my Powerbook G4

charlieroberts

charlieroberts

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 5, 2007
595
111
I have a powerbook G4 1.67 GHz that I want to give to my father,

He only surfs the web and is recently planning to rip his whole CD collection to an external 4 TB HDD (He has many hundreds -thousands?- classical music CD's that he's planning to rip in lossless).

This is the only computer available to him at this moment. I want the G4 to feel as snappy as possible so I bought 2 GB of RAM.
Then, I saw that the biggest IDE HDD is 320 GB 5400 rpm. Sounded good.

BUT my dad wont need as much storage. He has no apps and all the music will be stored on his external drive.

Then I saw that there are IDE SSD ! That got me going.
And I want to give him the fastest machine possible.

So my question.
Do any of you have a recomendation for an IDE SSD that will feel A LOT faster than the 320 GB 5400rpm IDE HDD ?

I dont want to buy a new machine, nor "put the money for the upgrades aside and buy a macbook"

I like thinking that an old machine is being put to good use, and don't minde "investing" in upgrades that will later be obsolete.

What I don't want is to buy a new SSD and regret it because of "stuttering issues" or slow speeds.

PS;

I found this 64 GB

worth it ?



Thanks a lot for reading my lengthy post and any advice offered
 
L

Lounge Deluxe

macrumors regular
Jun 1, 2009
152
20
Amsterdam
I can recommend the Mtron Mobi 3000 P-ATA to you. It's a SLC ssd and it does max 100MB/s reads and 80MB/s writes. I had a 16GB version and had loads of apps installed (OS Leopard) and still had 3GB free space left.

You could take a look here for some info (they've got a forum too).
 
I

iyacyas

macrumors member
Sep 4, 2008
91
0
I'm confused!

If he's going to rip from the CD straight to the External TB drive then why do you need a super-fast super-small internal drive? If he is going to use iTunes to do this then maybe I could see this as he will have a three step process, rip to internal drive until drive is maxed out, move the ripped music to external TB drive, then clean up the internal drive only to start the process again. Even doing it this way I really do not see the benefit of spending the money on the SSD, but then again I do not own an SSD. Maybe I should not have replied to you post, Sorry.
 
clyde2801

clyde2801

macrumors 601
Mar 6, 2008
4,365
54
In the land of no hills and red dirt.
Hitachi makes a single platter 160 gig IDE drive that's supposed to be almost as fast as many newish 7200 rpm drives. That may be a more financially viable option.

There's a couple of good websites for optimizing an older mac to run tiger and leopard, do a quick google search and you'll find them. They mostly involve turning off a lot of eye candy and unnecessary processor sucking options that leave a PPC a lot snappier in everyday use. Good luck.
 
charlieroberts

charlieroberts

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 5, 2007
595
111
I know the PBG4 is no slouch, but I what I'm saying is I want to make it the best computer it can be. And I'm sure that means SSD. I don't have unlimited budget (I checked DVnation out -thanks for the link- and it does seem rather expensive. If no one else chimes in, I think they will get my money, appear to be quality SSD) but I'm looking to spend upwards of 250 dlls.

I have even considered installing an optibay and RAID 0 two 16 GB ssd for crazy speeds.

(the CD ripping can occur on our 3 CD bay external enclosure)
 
wpc33

wpc33

macrumors 6502
Jul 2, 2006
305
1
Vancouver, BC
Considering how bottlenecked the very notion of red laser optical media is, you will not notice much, if any improvement on lossless ripping with an SSD.
You're better off with some RAM. The benefits of SSD's will not make the ripping faster, nor will it make iTunes so much more responsive, given the good processor.
Max the RAM, and consider using Tiger. I have a much slower notebook than you, and a 10GB partition at the beginning of the drive, running a slim version of 10.4.11(Thanks to Monolingual and Xslimmer), plus a final defrag with iDefrag, has kept my disk running very, very smoothly for over a year.
Don't get caught up in the SSD excitement over some simple, snappy uses like what you've described.
I hope that helps.
 
MultiFinder17

MultiFinder17

macrumors 68030
Jan 8, 2008
2,721
2,041
Tampa, Florida
Not sure what kinds of speed improvements you'd see, but it would be a good idea to not just consider using that external CD drive for ripping, but *only* consider using it. The slot-loading drives, especially now that they're getting on in years, don't like lots of heavy use all that much.
 
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