Post #3 in this very thread: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/is-an-ssd-worth-it.2235525/post-28459853
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Is an SSD worth it?
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I tried this kind of setup in a few different laptops. I originally bought a CF to 2.5” IDE adapter as I had a couple of 4GB CF cards which I wanted to try for a silent internal boot drive in a PowerBook 1400. The first CF card I tried wasn’t recognized at all (worked fine in the PCMCIA adapter). The 2nd card would format okay, but freeze the Finder during file operations. I tried the same configurations in both a Titanium PBG4 and a PDQ with the same results, so I figured it was the CF card.
I then bought another 4GB CF Card for about $5 to try and had the same crashy results. So I bought another adapter ($2) to rule out the adapter as faulty - my understanding is that CF to IDE is not much more than a pass through with a master/slave jumper, where the CF card itself handles the IDE I/O and not the adapter.
I then scrapped the CF card idea and tried the 16GB microSD > SD > CF > 2.5 IDE. All was looking good and OS X installed on the TiBook, then it started randomly locking up...
I ultimately gave up on the 2.5” approach and tried salvaging my efforts by going for the 3.5” route with success.
From what I can see, the difference between the 2.5” and 3.5” adapters is 3.3V vs 5V respectively. All was happy with the assembly on the 5V setup.
I would be interested in your results @Amethyst1 as I would like a cheap silent drive option for the PB1400 and PDQs - in these Macs I feel spending $$ on mSATA SSDs or similar would probably be overkill.
A modern mSATA SSD in a decent adapter will run circles around these old PATA drives. Especially 2.5" ones.
I have a 160GB Samsung and a 250GB WD that are regarded as being among the fastest 2.5" PATA drives out there. A modern SSD absolutely demolishes them.
As described earlier, Hitachi DeskStar hasn’t existed in eight years, and the successor, HGST, is now defunct. Hitachi’s laptop drives were labelled TravelStar and haven’t been sold new in years. WD’s laptop HDDs were called Scoprio, not Caviar.
These days, long-term reliability and good performance with low energy usage is the province of IDE-to-mSATA/m.2 adapters and a suitable SSD.
Also, @powermi, you literally wrote this endorsement one day earlier, so what gives?
Where I really notice the difference is in simultaneous read/writes. I have a machine that I use strictly for downloading "stuff". It's constantly downloading "stuff". Since I do not have an infinite amount of space on that machine I have to move that "stuff" somewhere else from time to time. When you have a single spinning disk that is writing (downloading stuff from the internet) and reading (moving stuff from that hard drive somewhere else) it gets REALLY slow. You can literally hear the head moving all over the disk as it jumps from the spot it is reading from to the spot it is writing to over and over again until sanity returns and the drive is just doing the one task.
A while back I stuck an SSD in my 17" 1.67ghz PowerBook G4, and this was the factor that influenced me the most - it suddenly dawned on me that you can't buy IDE hard drives any more. I felt a cold wind blow through me at that point because in the back of my mind I always assumed they would be available. Now they're only available second-hand, in dwindling numbers, of unknown provenance.
Here's my SSD, with a generic adapter, which came to a total cost of around £40 or so:
I can't say the SSD is any faster than a 7200rpm drive, but it works and it's silent. Whatever heat is generates is dissipated in the large empty space where the hard drive used to be:
The setup doesn't peg the IDE bus. I didn't test the original hard drive (it was probably on its last legs) but looking at IDE hard drive benchmarks the sequential reads and writes are about two and a bit times better versus ten+ times for the random figures.
Operationally it doesn't feel any different, given that I mostly use it as an iTunes jukebox. Could I have spent £40 on something else? I treated it mostly as a learning experience - I still have a conventional HDD in my TiBook.
In comparison when I upgraded the BIOS in my Core 2 Duo ThinkPad X61 and swapped the HDD for an SSD the results were immediately striking - Windows 8 zipped along.
Honestly, especially in a pre-OS X system, I'd say that even if there's no speed benefit the fact that the OS doesn't freeze while waiting for the HDD to spin up is reason enough to get one.
The pre-OS X system software is prone to freezing as it is and it always makes me nervous when it freezes while the HDD spins up.
The pre-OS X system software is prone to freezing as it is and it always makes me nervous when it freezes while the HDD spins up.
Same here. Ironically, the first SSD I ever bought (a cheap POS) caused freezes rather than eliminating them LOL.
One of the first things I would do on any older system is disable the "put HDD to sleep on idle" option in the energy saver settings. Its just unnecessary wear and tear to keep having the drive spin up and down all the time.
Interesting, thanks for the tip! I always assumed that it was partially used to reduce wear and tear, but it makes more sense that it actually causes more.
It's more of a power saving deal actually. With the drive spun down it's saving energy. However, how much power is an SSD really drawing compared to a spinning mechanical drive? And really how do you spin down an SSD?
Kind of a superfluous setting in light of that.
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense when you put it like that. I'd love to see what sort of "spinning down" an SSD would do (or attempt to do at least).
I just disabled it on my iBook (was already disabled on my Power Mac) because I am planning to do the SSD upgrade tomorrow and I also figured that if it was only energy-saving I didn't really need the setting on anyway.
I'm pretty sure the SSD just ignores any commands to spin down. Any well designed SSD should go into a low power state automatically when not accessing data.
I recently upgraded my Lenovo Ideapad to an SSD and it made me think about this topic again. The difference between an HDD and SSD on the Ideapad is night and day, I should have done it a long time ago. My Windows 10 experience was dreadful before, but now it's so much better.
In contrast, while there was some speed improvement when upgrading my PPC Macs to SSDs, it wasn't a night and day difference like I saw with my Ideapad. Windows 10 needs an SSD. Tiger, Leopard, and OS 9...not so much. The speed boost on my PPC Macs was more significant if coming from a slow HDD (such as the stock HDD in my iBook G3). When coming from a fast HDD, such as the Western Digital drive I used to have in my Sawtooth for use with Leopard, the speed boost was less significant. SSDs are still beneficial for reasons other than speed, but for those who don't care about the other benefits of an SSD and just want to upgrade from a slow HDD in their PPC Mac, a fast mechanical drive might be good enough. I still think SSDs are worth it, but a fast HDD wouldn't be a bad second choice, IMO.
In contrast, while there was some speed improvement when upgrading my PPC Macs to SSDs, it wasn't a night and day difference like I saw with my Ideapad. Windows 10 needs an SSD. Tiger, Leopard, and OS 9...not so much. The speed boost on my PPC Macs was more significant if coming from a slow HDD (such as the stock HDD in my iBook G3). When coming from a fast HDD, such as the Western Digital drive I used to have in my Sawtooth for use with Leopard, the speed boost was less significant. SSDs are still beneficial for reasons other than speed, but for those who don't care about the other benefits of an SSD and just want to upgrade from a slow HDD in their PPC Mac, a fast mechanical drive might be good enough. I still think SSDs are worth it, but a fast HDD wouldn't be a bad second choice, IMO.
You never mention what SSD you were using on PowerPC. Many SSD's are actually not that fast at all. Even some of the super budget modern ones. The key to good performance is that it has DRAM. If not, it will only be slightly faster than a 7200rpm HDD.
The SSD I use on both my Sawtooth and my iBook is a 120 GB Mercury Pro Legacy SSD from Other World Computing. The one for my Sawtooth is installed internally via a SATA to IDE adapter and the one for my iBook is inside an enclosure which is connected to the FireWire port.
EDIT: the one for the iBook is actually the Mercury Electra 6G, not the Pro Legacy.
The #1 rule with SSD's is that they're not all created equally. Many people throw all SSD's in the same basket. Think about how slow most thumb drives are. That's solid state storage, and most can't even saturate a USB 2 port.