I'm happy to contribute after my many-months-long efforts to bring this project to close.
@Wild Hare started this thread asking for a particular adapter. With his experience, I was able to get the right adapter right away without too much effort and it is as cheep as some tubes of thermal paste.
He did state that he was having issues with the revision number I purchased, that it was flaky when trying to dual-boot OS 9.
I have tested as much as I can and I can say that I have no issue with my current set up, 100% success thus far, so here goes.
Go onto ebay and search for PATA to SATA adapters. There is a small green board that has a model number "AS331" on it. There are two layouts. One has the SATA port and PATA pins perpendicular to the board. The one that we want has both connectors on the same plane and pointed opposite of each-other.
Now, if you want to pop in a half-length SSD board (which can normally be found by stripping a 2.5" SSD from its case) then you're good to go.
I, however, have a penchant for good old platters so there's a bit more to this. I also happen to have bought about ten 2.5" SATA 1TB drives for $5 a piece last year. They were all manufactured in 2021, show low SMART hours, and are Hitachi branded. If the drive that came with the mini has lasted at a minimum of sixteen-years, then I could expect this drive to possibly make it 2038 at which point I simply switch to the next one on the shelf.
There's some work involved to get a 2.5" drive to fit in the case with the adapter. It required no modification to the mini.
The adapter can be "compressed" with some modification. For one, the SATA connector on the adapter sticks out just a bit from where the pins meet the board. I used flat pliers and pressed the plastic SATA connector up against the board pins, bottoming them out into the plastic connector. On the PATA side, we remove the black forms that space out the pins then clip the pins to almost half their length. This allows the adapter to slide into the G4 riser as far as is possible. You can see in the picture that the green board actually overlaps the black connector block on the riser board. All together, this could save you about 1.5mm in space.
Once the board and drive are installed into the mini, the drive will be at a slight angle and the screws will certainly not line up with the holes. I place the hard drive end (far from the connector end) onto the shelf that is above the speaker and used a bit of double-sided tape to hold it in place or else it would strain the board.
Here's my advice from my mistake: if you are copying the data from one hard drive to the new one, do so before you install it because the adapter seems to cause I/O issues when using Target Disk Mode for cloning/restoring.
There are four times that I tried to copy OS 9 and it didn't boot. I believe most of this was due to going from a 6GB partition to 100GB partition and trying different clone methods. The successful attempt goes like this; I Simply partitioned the new drive then used "ditto" in terminal to copy everything from the top level of the old partition to the new one then blessed it. It has booted 100% successfully since then.
I think OS 9 has to be the first partition on the drive to boot, so I proceeded to clone my Leopard partition over with Disk Utility and finished with my Tiger partition.
I have never had a single issue booting into any OS, waking from sleep, running intensive apps etc.
Finally, I wrote a bash script to create 2GB and 10GB files of random and zero bits (simultaneously), then it deletes the files and loops. I ran the script in Tiger and then Leopard for about 3-hours each. The CPU remains pegged when creating random bits and data is always streaming so if there is any thermal impact on the adapter I feel like it would have shown by now.
I've waited after playing multiple intensive games in each OS and doing taxing tasks as well as finally going through many boot cycles to confirm that this is certainly a reliable way to add modern SATA spinners to increase storage considerably for some time to come.
I'm quite satisfied to see OS 9 allocated with 100GB, Leopard with 630GB and Tiger with about 250GB. It's satisfying to hear the platter spinning up and clicking and clacking as it works and TRIM or drivers etc. isn't a factor what-so-ever.
If you have a G4 mini, go for it.
@Wild Hare started this thread asking for a particular adapter. With his experience, I was able to get the right adapter right away without too much effort and it is as cheep as some tubes of thermal paste.
He did state that he was having issues with the revision number I purchased, that it was flaky when trying to dual-boot OS 9.
I have tested as much as I can and I can say that I have no issue with my current set up, 100% success thus far, so here goes.
Go onto ebay and search for PATA to SATA adapters. There is a small green board that has a model number "AS331" on it. There are two layouts. One has the SATA port and PATA pins perpendicular to the board. The one that we want has both connectors on the same plane and pointed opposite of each-other.
Now, if you want to pop in a half-length SSD board (which can normally be found by stripping a 2.5" SSD from its case) then you're good to go.
I, however, have a penchant for good old platters so there's a bit more to this. I also happen to have bought about ten 2.5" SATA 1TB drives for $5 a piece last year. They were all manufactured in 2021, show low SMART hours, and are Hitachi branded. If the drive that came with the mini has lasted at a minimum of sixteen-years, then I could expect this drive to possibly make it 2038 at which point I simply switch to the next one on the shelf.
There's some work involved to get a 2.5" drive to fit in the case with the adapter. It required no modification to the mini.
The adapter can be "compressed" with some modification. For one, the SATA connector on the adapter sticks out just a bit from where the pins meet the board. I used flat pliers and pressed the plastic SATA connector up against the board pins, bottoming them out into the plastic connector. On the PATA side, we remove the black forms that space out the pins then clip the pins to almost half their length. This allows the adapter to slide into the G4 riser as far as is possible. You can see in the picture that the green board actually overlaps the black connector block on the riser board. All together, this could save you about 1.5mm in space.
Once the board and drive are installed into the mini, the drive will be at a slight angle and the screws will certainly not line up with the holes. I place the hard drive end (far from the connector end) onto the shelf that is above the speaker and used a bit of double-sided tape to hold it in place or else it would strain the board.
Here's my advice from my mistake: if you are copying the data from one hard drive to the new one, do so before you install it because the adapter seems to cause I/O issues when using Target Disk Mode for cloning/restoring.
There are four times that I tried to copy OS 9 and it didn't boot. I believe most of this was due to going from a 6GB partition to 100GB partition and trying different clone methods. The successful attempt goes like this; I Simply partitioned the new drive then used "ditto" in terminal to copy everything from the top level of the old partition to the new one then blessed it. It has booted 100% successfully since then.
I think OS 9 has to be the first partition on the drive to boot, so I proceeded to clone my Leopard partition over with Disk Utility and finished with my Tiger partition.
I have never had a single issue booting into any OS, waking from sleep, running intensive apps etc.
Finally, I wrote a bash script to create 2GB and 10GB files of random and zero bits (simultaneously), then it deletes the files and loops. I ran the script in Tiger and then Leopard for about 3-hours each. The CPU remains pegged when creating random bits and data is always streaming so if there is any thermal impact on the adapter I feel like it would have shown by now.
I've waited after playing multiple intensive games in each OS and doing taxing tasks as well as finally going through many boot cycles to confirm that this is certainly a reliable way to add modern SATA spinners to increase storage considerably for some time to come.
I'm quite satisfied to see OS 9 allocated with 100GB, Leopard with 630GB and Tiger with about 250GB. It's satisfying to hear the platter spinning up and clicking and clacking as it works and TRIM or drivers etc. isn't a factor what-so-ever.
If you have a G4 mini, go for it.
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