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

Is an SSD worth it?

I'm running mSATAs /w that mentioned red mSATA-IDE-converter board on a few books (Clamshell, TiBook, 12&15"PB-G4, iBook-G4)
Booting-time, launching apps, noise-reduction and performance is much much more fun compared to similar divices with (old) spinning drives.
Only my 12" 1.5GHz PB heats up significantly more, and I'm running G4FanControl to elevate threshold-values for fan-activities. Temperature steady state without fan activitiy is about 65°C for GPU/CPU.
 
  • Like
Reactions: YesWeCat, Amethyst1, eyoungren and 1 other person
eyoungren said:
I copy the backups on my server (sparse bundles) directly to a backups folder on my 3TB external drive. That goes right up to Dropbox as that's where I have my Dropbox folder. I've got 3TB with Dropbox so this drive fits the bill nicely.

So, if the RAID on my server ever fails and the drives on all my Macs with Dropbox fail, I've still got a way to get to my backups because they are all on Dropbox.
[automerge]1589311631[/automerge]
Click to expand...

You have far more faith in the cloud than I ever will.
 
  • Like
Reactions: bobesch, YesWeCat, sparty411 and 4 others
B S Magnet said:
You have far more faith in the cloud than I ever will.
Click to expand...
There would have to be catastrophic failure in five places for me to lose my data.

1> Failure of the original hard drive.
2> Failure of the RAID array that stores the backup.
3> Failure of the 3TB drive the backup is copied to for Dropbox.
4> Failure of the media that Dropbox stores my data on.
5> Failure of all of the media that Dropbox backs their data up on.

4 and 5 are the least likely, 1-3 are possible but really not likely. However, it's that possibility that has me putting these on Dropbox. If 4 & 5 were to ever happen I'd have some legal recourse as I pay Dropbox $20 a month.

Now, if you mean faith in the 'cloud' as in faith that they'll never snoop, well I can't help that. However, as I mentioned, these are sparse bundles. Any system other than Mac OS is going to see them as large, unidentifiable files inside of folders. Now, if someone wants to violate policy, download and open one of these on a Mac then they should be prepared to fall asleep hard because my life is boring.
 
  • Like
  • Haha
Reactions: Amethyst1, bobesch, Raging Dufus and 2 others
I think what isn't always appreciated is that performance in SSDs varies widely in terms of thermal efficiency. I remember once getting a good deal on a Kingston V200 or 300 2.5" SSD. The temps went from 0ºC to 65ºC within a minute and stayed there. There wasn't anything wrong with the drive, it just had a rotten design that made it toasty so I sent it back before it cooked everything around it. Kingston had a lot of pushback on that drive and rejigged it.

I also checked on thermals before getting an NVMe drive for my MBP 2015. I saw that Samsung drives were fast but ran hot. Too hot for an ultrabook, so I settled on Adata, which was almost as fast but temps rarely get over 25ºC unless writes are pushed hard and long.
 
  • Like
Reactions: bobesch, RogerWilco6502, YesWeCat and 1 other person
powermi said:
In my experience on an iBook, its better to buy a reliable IDE/HDD. I use on my powermacs only IDEs for booting and SATA as storage drives.
BTW.. try to buy Hitachi with DesktStar tecchnology.
Click to expand...

Hitachi DeskStar no longer exists, and as of this year, HGST (Hitachi Global Storage Systems — what the Hitachi HDD line was called after Western Digital took over in 2012), is defunct.

At this point, go with whatever you can if you actually plan to use your iBook. These days, it is becoming easier and cheaper to add low-capacity SSDs with an IDE adapter into legacy gear.
 
  • Like
Reactions: RogerWilco6502, YesWeCat and Amethyst1
powermi said:
In my experience on an iBook, its better to buy a reliable IDE/HDD. I use on my powermacs only IDEs for booting and SATA as storage drives.
BTW.. try to buy Hitachi with DesktStar tecchnology.
Click to expand...
Perhaps there is a difference between the Travelstar and the Deskstar? I've had quite a few PowerPC Macs come with Hitachi Travelstars and these drives are slow and unreliable in my experience. Most of the drive failures I've had over the years have been because of Travelstars.

Consequently I avoid Hitachi drives.
 
  • Like
Reactions: YesWeCat
I may be just lucky but I haven’t noticed an increase in heat in any of the SSDs I’ve installed in my PowerPCs. I would even go as far as saying they might even run cooler than before - notably my 12” and 17” PB G4’s which use the red Lindy/Addonics adapters.

Like @eyoungren, I have opted for mostly SSDs in my laptops and 7200rpm spinners in my desktops.

I can see a definite speed improvement in every SSD upgrade, especially in the high-end G4’s, but this is even quite obvious in my iBook clamshell and Pismo when put side by side with similar spec’d Macs still running their original spinners.

Overall, I’d say yes it is worth it if you intend to squeeze the most out of your old Mac. The most enjoyable improvement for me is the silent operation.

Just out of curiosity, I bought a cheap, Chinese no name CF to IDE 3.5” adapter ($2) and an SD - CF adapter ($7) along with a microSD to SD adapter ($1) so I could try running a Sawtooth G4 on a ($5) SanDisk 16GB 80MB/sec microSD card.

Amusingly, this tiny microSD card which is no bigger than a fingernail benchmarks higher than the “high performance” 10GB Seagate SCSI drive which was once used as a dedicated DAW recording drive, but somehow I don’t see it lasting 20 years like the big SCSI spinner has.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Amethyst1, 1042686, bobesch and 6 others
AphoticD said:
Just out of curiosity, I bought a cheap, Chinese no name CF to IDE 3.5” adapter ($2) and an SD - CF adapter ($7) along with a microSD to SD adapter ($1) so I could try running a Sawtooth G4 on a ($5) SanDisk 16GB 80MB/sec microSD card.
Click to expand...

I intend to do the same with a 32GB microSD card and either my Mini or 867 MHz TiBook. OS 9 only.

('cause I don't know what else to do with the card LOL)
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: AphoticD, YesWeCat and 1042686
I installed an SSD using an IDE adapter several years ago with poor results. For *some* applications, they did indeed load a little faster. However, for other things, like copying files and unzipping applications proved to be significantly slower than a 7200rpm drive. For whatever reason, it seemed like the CPU was constantly pegged at 100% during these activities, almost as if UDMA wasn't activated. For those of us that are familiar with using windows during the period of IDE drives, its felt like when windows was stuck on 'PIO' mode instead of 'UDMA'.

In the end, the system felt slower because the CPU seemed to be working harder every time the drive was accessed. In the end, I ended up putting the 7200 drive back in. I'm not sure if it had to do with the specific chipset on the adapter, but my results were poor.
 
  • Like
Reactions: YesWeCat
A lot of people focus on the speed of the drive controller (ie. ATA/100 or SATA 1, 2, 3 etc.), but that's a limitation for ANY drive you put in there - SSD or HDD. The much more important factor for real world performance is latency. Lower latency is why a WD Black is faster than a Blue, and it's why an SSD is faster than any of them.

It's not really at all about the maximum capable speed, but rather how quickly a drive can perform within the bus bandwidth.

My advice... use modern SSD's with adapters over older ones without adapters. Most older IDE/ATA SSD's can barely keep up with a modern spinner. The Kingston A400 series is a great place to start. I've bought 120GB models on sale for $18 US.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Amethyst1, AphoticD, YesWeCat and 2 others
timidpimpin said:
A lot of people focus on the speed of the drive controller (ie. ATA/100 or SATA 1, 2, 3 etc.), but that's a limitation for ANY drive you put in there - SSD or HDD. The much more important factor for real world performance is latency. Lower latency is why a WD Black is faster than a Blue, and it's why an SSD is faster than any of them.

It's not really at all about the maximum capable speed, but rather how quickly a drive can perform within the bus bandwidth.

My advice... use modern SSD's with adapters over older ones without adapters. Most older SSD's can barely keep up with a modern spinner. The Kingston A400 series is a great place to start. I've bought 120GB models on sale for $18 US.
Click to expand...

I’ll add how I’ve had consistently good experiences with both iRecdata and Dogfish SSDs — both being a sort of companion/counterpart to the Zheino SSDs which @eyoungren’s had good experience using. Different brands from the PRC have varying availability depending on where you are.
 
  • Like
Reactions: timidpimpin, Amethyst1, YesWeCat and 1 other person
z970mp said:
So the SSD was Sata-based, meaning an mSata? I take it then that the IDE converter was a 2.5" IDE enclosure?
Click to expand...
Its been a few years, so I can't give you the exact model. I know it wasn't in an enclosure. It looked very similar to something like this..
81zOYfxwL4L._AC_SX425_.jpg
 
  • Like
Reactions: YesWeCat and 1042686
My mistake, I got it in my head that we were talking about laptop SSDs...

@CubeHacker I've used those before and have had consistently good results, be it spinner or solid. Maybe yours was damaged in some way?
 
  • Like
Reactions: YesWeCat and 1042686
I have experienced both excellent results and poor results including inability to boot using these. All of these were unbranded, cheap Chinese adapters and their performance really ran the gamut from excellent to poor. Heck, they're so cheap though, I can't complain about the few stinkers that cost me all of $5.00 USD shipped maybe?

I like to use PCI sata solutions when I can like sil3512 cards and others. You have to flash em but they're cheap and readily available.

Goof luck.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Amethyst1, YesWeCat and RogerWilco6502
RhianB said:
I have experienced both excellent results and poor results including inability to boot using these. All of these were unbranded, cheap Chinese adapters and their performance really ran the gamut from excellent to poor. Heck, they're so cheap though, I can't complain about the few stinkers that cost me all of $5.00 USD shipped maybe?

I like to use PCI sata solutions when I can like sil3512 cards and others. You have to flash em but they're cheap and readily available.

Goof luck.
Click to expand...
This is a good point. I went with the red PCB adapters cuz those have a better track record. I don't have a computer to flash PCI cards on, but those are definitely the most reliable solutions from what I've heard.
 
  • Like
Reactions: 1042686 and YesWeCat
With minimal investment in capital and time, you get superior throughput (133/233/533 dependent on bus speed), bootable media, large drive support (in older powermacs) and you're not reliant on elderly drives that like anything will be increasingly prone to failure as we move forward.

Lots of benefits to moving to SATA and SSD solutions beyond speed alone.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Amethyst1, z970, YesWeCat and 1 other person
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back