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ATA Bus Speed ?

A

andloph

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 13, 2017
50
45
Spain
Hi,

does anyone know if there is a tool that provides information about the available ATA Bus speeds ?

I´m asking because i´m thinking about removing the optical drive of my powerbook and replace it with a pata ssd i have lying around.
This second ssd is actually identical to the one where the system is already installed, i will probably also setup both drives as a raid0 to see what the performance would be.
I know this probably won´t make much difference, it would just be for fun.
BUT this would only make sense if i have 2 identical buses. In theory this thing should have 2 x ATA100 buses but i wouldn´t be suprised if the optical drive is attached to just a 33MhZ Bus.
I have found the service manual of this powerbook but there is no information in there about this.

Any suggestion ?

Thanks
 
MacTracker can give you all sorts of information like that on any model of Mac you desire. For instance, here's my Mac Mini:
Picture 1.png


As you can see, it'll list the interface(s) used by the computer's drives.
 
Amethyst1 said:
That's only the hard drive's interface though. The optical drive usually sits on a different bus that may well be slower.
Click to expand...
If there's a separate optical drive interface, it will be listed. I probably should have used my Power Mac to demonstrate. IIRC most Apple portables from this time (and the Mac Minis) put everything on the same bus.
 
RogerWilco6502 said:
If there's a separate optical drive interface, it will be listed. I probably should have used my Power Mac to demonstrate. IIRC most Apple portables from this time (and the Mac Minis) put everything on the same bus.
Click to expand...

Gotcha - you're right. That defeats the purpose of putting two SSDs in a RAID 0.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
Gotcha - you're right. That defeats the purpose of putting two SSDs in a RAID 0.
Click to expand...
Yeah, tbh RAID 0 has always made me nervous. I'd probably only use it if the array were hooked up to some hourly backup system or something else that gave the array some parity.

@andloph A good way to see if you have one or two ATA buses is to go into the System Profiler and look under ATA. It should list two like here on my Power Mac:
Picture 1.png


As opposed to what it looks like on my Mac Mini:
Picture 2.png
 
RogerWilco6502 said:
Yeah, tbh RAID 0 has always made me nervous. I'd probably only use it if the array were hooked up to some hourly backup system or something else that gave the array some parity.
Click to expand...

When I used a G4 Mini as my main box, I experimented with a RAID 0 comprised of the internal drive and an identical one hooked up via FireWire. That was fun but it randomly refused to mount after a while, so I canned the idea.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
When I used a G4 Mini as my main box, I experimented with a RAID 0 comprised of the internal drive and an identical one hooked up via FireWire. That was fun but it randomly refused to mount after a while, so I canned the idea.
Click to expand...
From what I've seen, Macs (especially PPC Macs it seems) seem to have a troubled relationship with software RAID.
 
Hi eveyone and thanks for the quick replies !

Yes, im aware of Mactracker and i have already checked in the system if 2 Buses are displayed.
There are 2 displayed indeed but i would really like to confirm in advance what the actual speed of the 2nd Bus is and if it really is a second bus and not just one bus with 2 interfaces.
Will boot up a linux livecd to see what tools i can use there, maybe lshw or some /proc interface can give me more details. hdparm and other similar tools are useless unless you plug in a hard drive.

Raid0 is excellent if you are looking for max possible speed and you don´t care about the data being stored in it.
Which is exactly my case here :)

thanks !
 
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andloph said:
Hi eveyone and thanks for the quick replies !

Yes, im aware of Mactracker and i have already checked in the system if 2 Buses are displayed.
There are 2 displayed indeed but i would really like to confirm in advance what the actual speed of the 2nd Bus is and if it really is a second bus and not just one bus with 2 interfaces.
Will boot up a linux livecd to see what tools i can use there, maybe lshw or some /proc interface can give me more details. hdparm and other similar tools are useless unless you plug in a hard drive.

Raid0 is excellent if you are looking for max possible speed and you don´t care about the data being stored in it.
Which is exactly my case here :)

thanks !
Click to expand...
Do you know what the exact model of PowerBook this is?
 
I usually just use Everymac. It has literally all information ever. It also works fairly quick on even the slowest of PPC macs, if you can get past the horrid captcha. Mac tracker is good, he gets the info from everymac.
But, I've found a few discrepancies here and there. Also, this doesn't pertain to PPC Macs but Mac Tracker hasn't been updated in over a year. It doesn't have the New Mac Pro, or any mention of Catalina. I was also annoyed that the dev only supports 10.11+ for newer versions on a database app that could literally run on OS 9 or at least all OS X versions if he wanted to put in that little extra time.
 
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RogerWilco6502 said:
Yeah, tbh RAID 0 has always made me nervous. I'd probably only use it if the array were hooked up to some hourly backup system or something else that gave the array some parity.
Click to expand...
It really isn't as scary as you think, especially with SSDs.

I have a Mac that has been running a few SW RAID0 drives for years. My Mac Pro has a SW RAID0 as a boot drive with SSDs, and it has not had any issues for the many years. I did have a HDD SW RAID0 drive fail six years ago.

I am thinking about doing a three SSD SW RAID0 as a boot drive on my Late 2012 iMac using a TB hub and three USB3 to SATA adapters. I will use its Fusion Drive as a bootable backup that will be daily updated using CCC. Or maybe I might do NVMe over TB. I haven't decided yet.

With the Late 2011 MBP that I am currently typing on, I have three old 2.5" HDDs in a SW RAID0 that I use for encoding video so I don't have to use my internal SSD. It is all replaceable data though, so I am not worried if one HDD fails.

Although, I have not run a SW RAID on my PowerPC Macs, not sure about the experience there, but I might play around with it one day.
 
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vertical smile said:
It really isn't as scary as you think, especially with SSDs.

I have a Mac that has been running a few SW RAID0 drives for years. My Mac Pro has a SW RAID0 as a boot drive with SSDs, and it has not had any issues for the many years. I did have a HDD SW RAID0 drive fail six years ago.

I am thinking about doing a three SSD SW RAID0 as a boot drive on my Late 2012 iMac using a TB hub and three USB3 to SATA adapters. I will use its Fusion Drive as a bootable backup that will be daily updated using CCC. Or maybe I might do NVMe over TB. I haven't decided yet.

With the Late 2011 MBP that I am currently typing on, I have three old 2.5" HDDs in a SW RAID0 that I use for encoding video so I don't have to use my internal SSD. It is all replaceable data though, so I am not worried if one HDD fails.

Although, I have not run a SW RAID on my PowerPC Macs, not sure about the experience there, but I might play around with it one day.
Click to expand...
Ok, interesting! Thanks for the info :D
 
just for the record : the interface the optical drive is connected to is indeed slower than the main interface for the hd :

hd :

Code: 
Results    189.13    
System Info 
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5 (9A581)
Physical RAM 2048 MB
Model PowerBook5,4
Processor PowerPC G4 @ 1.33 GHz
L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 512K @ 1.33 GHz
Bus Frequency 167 MHz
Video Card ATY,RV360M11
Drive Type KINGSTON SUV500MS120G KINGSTON SUV500MS120G
Disk Test 189.13 
Sequential 131.25 
Uncached Write 123.13 75.60 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 142.20 80.46 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 111.83 32.73 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 156.72 78.77 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 338.37 
Uncached Write 196.10 20.76 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 260.07 83.26 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 2336.70 16.56 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 408.35 75.77 MB/sec [256K blocks]

optical drive :
Code: 
Results    36.42    
System Info 
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5 (9A581)
Physical RAM 2048 MB
Model PowerBook5,4
Processor PowerPC G4 @ 1.33 GHz
L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 512K @ 1.33 GHz
Bus Frequency 167 MHz
Video Card ATY,RV360M11
Drive Type KINGSTON SUV500MS120G KINGSTON SUV500MS120G
Disk Test 36.42 
Sequential 24.02 
Uncached Write 21.48 13.19 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 21.15 11.96 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 30.79 9.01 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 24.85 12.49 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 75.32 
Uncached Write 87.31 9.24 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 38.88 12.45 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 1065.35 7.55 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 66.67 12.37 MB/sec [256K blocks]
 
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@andloph - Thanks for the results. It looks like the ODD's bus is running at UDMA0 (16.7 MB/s max) or something like that. Can you try a hard drive on the bus to see if it's not some incompatibility with the SSD?
 
already tried with 2 different ssds and 1 rotational hd : more or less the same ...

Maybe the adapter I use has its influence and I’m not sure if this only applies to this laptop.

Thing is though : once you get into OF the second drive is detected as an “atapi-hd” which suggests that for whatever silly reason Apple has only enabled the atapi protocol for this interface.
On the disk manager there is no mention of this and the disk appears just as a regular disk connected.

With this performance I haven’t even tried to setup the raid as it would be pointless.
 
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