Found a great use for my iBook G4

[filmbuff]

Disk utility! For some reason Apple ruined Disk Utility in modern MacOS. Every time I try to reformat or erase a disk it either tells me it can't do it, it's greyed out for no reason, or I get errors about being able to unmount the disk. But somehow, Disk Util in Tiger works perfectly. Just today I "saved" 2 hard drives that were unusable on my modern MBA. They had been formatted by a Windows PC and my MBA wouldn't work with them at all. PPC, no problem. What's more, after I reformatted them with the PPC iBook they worked just fine with the MBA.

This is why I keep a PPC computer around. Uses just pop up out of the blue because for some reason every computer maker, especially Apple, thinks that making things more modern = dumbing them down and taking away useful features. I might even go ahead and add a 12" Powerbook because I've had my eye on one and it looks like I can justify it.

I also noticed that transferring a 1GB file onto a USB stick was faster on the iBook than the MBA. Not really sure what's going on there.

 

[Project Alice]

I also use my PPC macs to format drives when my Mac Pro gives me a headache with it. Usually just erasing a drive is no problem, at least not anymore in 10.13.6. I still find the old DU is way more reliable, as well as easier to use.

For the record, you should being Leopard for this. Leopard introduced live disk resizing, which is the ability to resize disks without erasing them. Obviously if it's important, you should still have a backup. Nevertheless, it makes things much, much easier. All iBook G4s are capable of running leopard, and as long as there is at least 1GB of ram the speed difference is marginal at best. Leopard is not as slow as people like to say it is on here. I use it on every device I own that is equipped with a G4 CPU, except my cube and that is solely for the fact that I have yet to replace the rage 128 pro, which makes even tiger an unpleasant experience.

 

[timidpimpin]

I also noticed that transferring a 1GB file onto a USB stick was faster on the iBook than the MBA. Not really sure what's going on there.

Were you copying the file in the exact same way on both? USB sticks will typically always read much faster than write, and at a much bigger discrepancy than the read write difference on hard drives.

 

[SkippyThorson]

I’m so glad it’s not just me. My 2012 Mac Mini at work and my 2012 MacBook Pro at home will both just destroy flash drives when given the chance. The redesigned disk utility has been nothing but headaches for me. The previous one; no problem. Maybe I’ll break out my iBook too. For now, Windows behaves as well.

 

[filmbuff]

Alright I actually think there's something wrong with my MBA. I had a 500GB HDD the other day that I wiped and formatted as an APFS drive. Today I plugged it in and it asked me for the password. Uh.. I never set a password. So I try a couple passwords I MAY have set, no joy. Try to wipe it again, no joy. Needs the password. Plug it into the iBook, wipes it with no issue, reformat as extended, journaled. Back to MBA, works fine. I wonder if something got jacked up when I made the switch to High Sierra and APFS.