Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

skinniezinho

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 1, 2009
1,084
91
Portugal
Hi guys,I am "studying" what is the best solution for my powermac g4,and maybe you can help too..
First consideration:
IDE Bus - in my case,ATA 66 => 66Mb/s Top

Second Consideration,and this is where I stopped:

Read/Write speeds vs time acess vs price:

Basically: Wich is better?
A good CF or a good mechanica drive?

For Example I spent about 22eur in a 8Gb 233X CF+ adapter,wich does about
34MB/s Write
30Mb/s Read

wich is +- the speeds that it was rated for,with the benefit of almost zero time acess.
For about 40eur,the only thing that I can get is a Transcend 400X 8Gb wich is rated for:
Write Speed: 60MB/s
Read Speed: 90MB/s


Wouldn't be better to choose a 3.5' Seagate Barracuda 500Gb 16Mb Cache SATA II Single Plate (ST3500418AS) for the same 40eur??(I already have the sata do ide adapter)
It is rated for 160Mb/s,so I guess it will do with ease the 66Mb/s of the ide barrier right?

I tested an old Hitachi 160Gb 8mb cache 7200rpm IDE 3.5' on a powermac 733Mhz and gave me something like 55MB/s for read/write.

Other option that I have is buying a used external firewire HDD,and use it as main,but guess would be slower right?
I seen WD Studio 3.5' 500Gb for 45eur (without warranty) and Iomega 2.5 500Gb with warranty for 50eur.
The thing is that I already own a 250Gb external HDD (usb2).
Opinions and benchmarks needed :D

Here is a benchark from a user of macrumors:


Code:
Drive Type		WDC WD1600BEKT-00F3T0

Disk Test    	72.25	
		Sequential	123.73	
		Uncached Write	142.05	87.22 MB/sec [4K blocks]
		Uncached Write	121.60	68.80 MB/sec [256K blocks]
		Uncached Read	101.85	29.81 MB/sec [4K blocks]
		Uncached Read	138.00	69.36 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random     	51.02	
		Uncached Write	18.28	1.93 MB/sec [4K blocks]
		Uncached Write	157.93	50.56 MB/sec [256K blocks]
		Uncached Read	93.43	0.66 MB/sec [4K blocks]
		Uncached Read	150.47	27.92 MB/sec [256K blocks]

emac.jpg


This is 2.5" WD Black in my eMac with SATA -> IDE 3.5" adapter.
 

Transporteur

macrumors 68030
Nov 30, 2008
2,729
3
UK
There is no way the 500GB WD drive does 160MB/s.
Not even the fastest mechanical hard drives you can get these days (600GB 10kRPM drives, or 3TB 7200RPM) can reach that much.

A realistic value for a 500GB drive would be around 80MB/s.

What you could do is to buy a PCI SATA card. That card won't throttle the 500GB drive (133MB/s PCI throughput limit).
 

skinniezinho

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 1, 2009
1,084
91
Portugal
There is no way the 500GB WD drive does 160MB/s.
Not even the fastest mechanical hard drives you can get these days (600GB 10kRPM drives, or 3TB 7200RPM) can reach that much.

A realistic value for a 500GB drive would be around 80MB/s.

What you could do is to buy a PCI SATA card. That card won't throttle the 500GB drive (133MB/s PCI throughput limit).

Thanks for the info,I only stated what the store says (max 160Mb/s).
PCi Sata Cards are too much money for a machine like mine.
And HDD can always have another uses ,machine indepentent.
But once again thanks for that value :)
 

Cox Orange

macrumors 68000
Jan 1, 2010
1,814
241
there are benchmarks on japamacs.com for a WD Raptor (10k) and others.

Other HDD Mac benchmarks at barefeats.com and xlr8yourmac AND http://www.google.de/search?q=mac+b...&rls=org.mozilla:de:official&client=firefox-a

(btw: for your external enclosure I would prefer firewire over USB... but never use it as a main boot drive).

If you have a Mac that is said to be limited to 128GB Drives, notice that you can use bigger drives, using an OS higher than 10.2 and remembering that under OS 9.2.2 (OS 9.1 is limited to 128GB) you have to make partitions of less than 200GB.
 

skinniezinho

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 1, 2009
1,084
91
Portugal
there are benchmarks on japamacs.com for a WD Raptor (10k) and others.

Other HDD Mac benchmarks at barefeats.com and xlr8yourmac AND http://www.google.de/search?q=mac+b...&rls=org.mozilla:de:official&client=firefox-a

(btw: for your external enclosure I would prefer firewire over USB... but never use it as a main boot drive).

If you have a Mac that is said to be limited to 128GB Drives, notice that you can use bigger drives, using an OS higher than 10.2 and remembering that under OS 9.2.2 (OS 9.1 is limited to 128GB) you have to make partitions of less than 200GB.

Thanks for the sites.
I know about the 128Gb stuff...
Well I though about using firewire as main hdd,but if you say it won't be good,it's minus an option :)
 

Cox Orange

macrumors 68000
Jan 1, 2010
1,814
241
Thanks for the sites.
I know about the 128Gb stuff...
Well I though about using firewire as main hdd,but if you say it won't be good,it's minus an option :)

there's one thing I forgot. Do you have the G4 MDD with firewire800? This would make things different. Because with firewire400 you are below the 66MB/s, but fw800 is theoretically above the 66MB/s.
 

skinniezinho

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 1, 2009
1,084
91
Portugal
there's one thing I forgot. Do you have the G4 MDD with firewire800? This would make things different. Because with firewire400 you are below the 66MB/s, but fw800 is theoretically above the 66MB/s.

Nope,it's the Gigabit Ethernet on my sig.
Guess the better option is the mechanical hdd right?

edit: I sold my Compact Flash Card,will buy this baby: Samsung Spinpoint F3 500Gb.
Will see how much the "real IDE bottleneck" is :)
 
Last edited:

skinniezinho

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 1, 2009
1,084
91
Portugal
Well,I bought the Samsung 500Gb Spinpoint F3, people told me it is one of the fastest 500Gb "normal" HDD's.
Put it on the powermac using the sata to ide adapter,and cloned my system to it.
Benched it and it only gave me about 40.5Mb/s Read and Write,could it be the adapter that is the bottleneck?or it is the ATA66 "chip" on the motherboard?
 

666sheep

macrumors 68040
Dec 7, 2009
3,686
291
Poland
I think ATA66 + adapter are the culprit. What adapter you have?

Single HD502HJ does a little more than 100MB/s R&W (measured with AJA). I have 3 of them in SW RAID 0 in MP and they do near 400MB/s in this setup.

In my eMac I use this one:
1.jpg
(sorry, couldn't find bigger pic). It's 4world brand (i.e. "no name" ;))
 

skinniezinho

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 1, 2009
1,084
91
Portugal
I think ATA66 + adapter are the culprit. What adapter you have?

Single HD502HJ does a little more than 100MB/s R&W (measured with AJA). I have 3 of them in SW RAID 0 in MP and they do near 400MB/s in this setup.

In my eMac I use this one:
1.jpg
(sorry, couldn't find bigger pic). It's 4world brand (i.e. "no name" ;))

I have one from ebay (china made) :D

 
Last edited:

zen.state

macrumors 68020
Mar 13, 2005
2,181
8
If I were you I would just get a PCI SATA card and not mess with adapters at all. That way you can use any current large and cheap drive. SATA-IDE adapters always tend to hinder performance and many of them can cause data corruption on a Mac.

My FirmTek SATA card works perfectly with 10.4 and 10.5. It was $70. On my Sawtooth's PCI with the FirmTek 1S2 card I get about 78MB/sec real world hard drive bandwidth consistently. Because modern SATA drives can easily do 100MB+ even at the low end you don't even have to worry about what drive performs best other than maybe a larger buffer like 32MB+. My boot drive is a 1TB WD Black and has a 64MB buffer and seems a bit faster in certain ways over the 32MB buffer Hitachi I used to boot from.

Last week I saw a 1TB WD Blue for $58 and a Seagate 2TB for $80. Personally I am a fan of the WD Black drives and the Hitachi Desktar series.

I would say the FirmTek SATA card was one of my greatest purchases in the ongoing upgrade project that is my Sawtooth. Couldn't work any better. 100% seamless.
 

Cox Orange

macrumors 68000
Jan 1, 2010
1,814
241
...cause data corruption on a Mac.

(...) 64MB buffer (...)

I hope the PPC will handle the 4k sectors of the 64MB buffer well. I heard there were big issues on Windows Vista (other than Win 7) with that drives. WD just says that it works for Macs, but since it seems nobody is interested in PPC-Macs in the industry, I am wary if they just mean Intel-Macs and did not test old Macs. I would use them, too, in my PPC-Macs, but am too chicken-hearted to do it. I fear that I will see that data gets corrupted too late.

I would gladly welcome somebody to take my fears away, out of selfexoerience or profound knowledge. :) Unfortunately no one at xlr8yourmac.com did test them so far, it seems.
 

zen.state

macrumors 68020
Mar 13, 2005
2,181
8
I hope the PPC will handle the 4k sectors of the 64MB buffer well. I heard there were big issues on Windows Vista (other than Win 7) with that drives. WD just says that it works for Macs, but since it seems nobody is interested in PPC-Macs in the industry, I am wary if they just mean Intel-Macs and did not test old Macs. I would use them, too, in my PPC-Macs, but am too chicken-hearted to do it. I fear that I will see that data gets corrupted too late.

I would gladly welcome somebody to take my fears away, out of selfexoerience or profound knowledge. :) Unfortunately no one at xlr8yourmac.com did test them so far, it seems.

The data corruption issue I mention is caused by some or even many of those IDE to SATA drive interface adapters. The reason many of them can cause data issues is that the drive controllers on these adapters are rarely fully Mac compatible. Most of them use a controller chipset that would be found in USB drive enclosures. Although many can mount drives fine on a Mac few can boot on a Mac. Maybe try the one sheep 666sheep uses as he seems happy.

I use my WD black SATA drive with a 64MB buffer on a PCI SATA card. No adapters at all. I have been running this as my boot drive for at least 8-9 months now without any issues whatsoever. I boot prom a partition on the first 120GB of it and am running 10.5.8 by the way.
 

skinniezinho

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 1, 2009
1,084
91
Portugal
Just to give a little contribution,ended buying an used A-CARD 6290M (30eur with shipping) and the Samsung F3 500Gb.
Now I can see 60Mb/s + on my G4.
Now I can see that 400MHz is really the culprit of some of the slowness.
I bought a SOnnet 1.2GHz cpu, as soon as I install it I will run some benches and put it here =)
 

seveej

macrumors 6502a
Dec 14, 2009
827
51
Helsinki, Finland
What you could do is to buy a PCI SATA card. That card won't throttle the 500GB drive (133MB/s PCI throughput limit).

I concur. I have a sonnet PCI SATA card in my MDD, using two Seagate Barracuda LP's (it's the weird drive doing 5900 rpm), which are rated for max 140/120 MBps (read/write) and when moving large files, I regularly get an actual throughput of 75-85 MBps (this machine works as a server, so those measurements are in fact upload/download speeds (GLAN, jumbo frames)). Have not come close to 133 though :)

I do not have an extra SSD lying around, otherwise I may have tested.

If you really need to put some serious storage into your PMG4, I strongly recommend it.
 

skinniezinho

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 1, 2009
1,084
91
Portugal
I concur. I have a sonnet PCI SATA card in my MDD, using two Seagate Barracuda LP's (it's the weird drive doing 5900 rpm), which are rated for max 140/120 MBps (read/write) and when moving large files, I regularly get an actual throughput of 75-85 MBps (this machine works as a server, so those measurements are in fact upload/download speeds (GLAN, jumbo frames)). Have not come close to 133 though :)

I do not have an extra SSD lying around, otherwise I may have tested.

If you really need to put some serious storage into your PMG4, I strongly recommend it.

As I said I bought an AEC-6290M card, but it tops at 60-65Mb/s (I've read somewhere that this card is not a "true" sata card, but something like a scsi converted card.
Sonnet cards go for insane prices on ebay (at least for europe).
I have seen this and I may give it a go.
SIL3512 cards go for about 10-22eur with shipping included on ebay/amazon/etc, flashing is a not a problem for me...so..
I don't need serious storage, just want a little performance bump =)
I now have a 600x CF Card I'd like to try too...
 

skinniezinho

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 1, 2009
1,084
91
Portugal
I got mine from OWC ( http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Sonnet Technologies/TSATA/ ) (and I'm in the euro zone as well), around 80€ (incl. shipment), but as I plugged in some 220€ worth of hard drives it did not seem too steep.

RGDS,

Managed to get one too.
I don't know why, but using AJA Speed Test I don't get much difference vs my old ACARD 6290M

Decided to do some XBench on my HDDs.
Tried my Samsung 830 256Gb (it's from my Thinkpad, just deleted the linux partition, formated it in HFS+ and benched it) too.
Here are the results:

Seagate 80Gb IDE


Samsung 830 256Gb


Maxtor Sata I HDD


Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD502HJ



Anyone with similar machine to compare results?
 
Last edited:

ybz90

macrumors 6502a
Jul 10, 2009
609
2
I wasn't going to post at first since this is an old thread, but since the OP is still here, I want to note that you might be confusing bits with bytes. There are 8 bits to a byte, so when you see Mb (megabit) that is NOT the same as MB (megabyte). 1MB = 8Mb.

So from earlier, when you mention the WD hard drive rated for 160Mb/s, that's really just 20MB/s. That drive would not saturate your ATA/66, which is 66 MB/s, not Mb/s.

I don't have a G4 tower to compare, but I am familiar with the Samsung 830, which in my opinion, is far superior in speed and reliability to the 840 that 'replaced' it and is even better than the famous Crucial M4. Like most things, I'm guessing that these cards are fairly limited in their ability to provide anywhere near the advertised 1.5Gbps (gigabit, so 187.5MB/s), so realistically, the reason you might be seeing similar speeds to the other card is simply that the devices you have attached either come close to saturating or exceed the capabilities of the cards themselves.
 

ppcfanforever1

macrumors regular
Dec 31, 2012
227
1
Pennsylvania
Would you recommend the owc ssd? They look like they have alot of potential. Are they faster and longer lasting? If so are they worth the price?
 

ybz90

macrumors 6502a
Jul 10, 2009
609
2
Would you recommend the owc ssd? They look like they have alot of potential. Are they faster and longer lasting? If so are they worth the price?

I can't speak to those as I don't have any experience with them. Some users here have bought them and have had positive impressions, but in my humble opinion, they are just too insanely overpriced to be worthwhile.

Maybe a year or two ago, when all SSDs were costly, they were a competitive value proposition, but with today's plummeting SSD prices, there is no reason any drive should cost $150 for just 60GB. The novelty behind them really is that they are one of the only, if not the only, manufacturer with a PATA SSD that uses a Sandforce controller. Most others use unknown or low-quality/unreliable controllers, such as the first-generation JMicron, and are frequently old stock since few PATA drives are still being manufactured. This issue is exacerbated by the fact that early drives don't feature very strong garbage collection (and TRIM is impossible with PATA SSDs), though Tiger and Leopard don't support it anyway.

However, PATA drives feature an old technology for its connectivity and are highly limited in speed (if I'm not mistaken, the fastest ATA connection is 133 MB/s?) compared to SATA2 (3Gbps) and SATA3 (6Gbps). Truthfully, PATA SSDs don't come anywhere close to utilizing the full speed of the chips inside. It's for this reason that I think the OWC Legacy SSDs are overkill... you have a great controller inside, but it will never be utilized (especially since it's not even PATA native, it's actually a true SATA drive using a PATA bridge).

So... when you can get the latest (or last gen) SATA SSDs for less than $1 per GB, and a cheap PATA-SATA bridge of your own if necessary, I can't see the justification for their prices in today's market.

edit: By the way, for the PowerBook I rebuilt, I ended up buying an off-brand (Kingspec) PATA SSD. There isn't much about the particular model that I got, mostly negative reviews about earlier versions that featured the aforementioned JMicron controller. Since I didn't want to drop a lot of money on this computer, however, I figured getting a serviceable drive as cheaply as possible was my best option and the new SMI controller sounded promising. I can post impressions and benchmarks when I receive it if you want.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.