So, the SATA->PATA adapters came in today and I set some time aside to put them to use in
SawtoothAlpha, the G4 with the
Radeon 9700 +
768MB RAM.
Out came the noisy,
original 20GB IBM 5400rpm HDD and I began to answer some of my own questions about the capabilities of the Sawtooth with SATA drives.
1. Here is the PATA/IDE to SATA adapter. An AU$6 no-name eBay product out of HK. There is one jumper on the unit which changes between master and slave configuration (no cable-select option). I purchased the 2010 stock 160GB, 7200rpm SATA-II WD 3Gbps Caviar Blue HDDs (model WD1600AJS) for AU$15 each. There was no need to set any jumpers on the drive.
2. One shortcoming of the cheap adapter is that the backside of the 4-pin power connection makes contact with the steel top-cover of the HDDs. Not a very wise design choice and something that will short and quickly end the life of my 19 year old G4.
3. A couple of layers of gaffer tape for insulation and we have a usable product.
4. I have two of the drives adapted and mounted on a dual-mount HDD caddy. I tried a few configurations for screwing it down with a second plate, but nothing fit neatly, so I abandoned the idea and simply wedged the drives under the PSU fan. I just need to keep this in mind next time I turn the machine upside-down...
5. The dual-HDD caddy is installed snug inside the G4. I had to turn them around like this because the SATA drives when combined with the adapters are longer and prevent the door from closing when set in the standard orientation. The standard master/slave IDE cable was not long enough to accommodate this change, so I swapped it out with these tidy old cables which were salvaged from a dead
Pentium 4 Hackintosh many, many years ago. In fact, this was also where the G4's flashed Radeon 9700 card came from.
6. An unexpected feature of the cheap adapter is a bright-green LED. There is also a flashing red status indicator LED. Pretty... But not visible at all during normal operation.
7. With both drives installed and jumpers set, I booted into the Panther installation CD and setup the software RAID in Disk Utility. Regardless of the 160GB capacity, the drives are recognized as 128GB. We combine the two in a Striped (faster) scheme for a total of 256GB of pure 7200rpm speed.
I then tried to simply do a Firewire "Restore" from the existing 20GB Tiger installation across to the RAID. This took about an hour to transfer. On first boot, all looked to be going well, but once the kernel loaded and it looked like the OS was about to boot, it would drop into the console view with a "missing media: disk2" error. I tried a few different things to make this boot and although single-user mode worked fine, it would fail when getting past the early stages.
I decided that Tiger must need to do some trickery to properly boot from the RAID. So, I erased the RAID and set it up again for a clean install from the Tiger DVD. Installation was quick (about 25 mins) and I was pleasantly welcomed with the Tiger first-boot tune. Everything felt fast and responsive. I went through and configured, then ran all of the Tiger updates and installed all of my regular apps.
I can confirm that the faster boot device makes everything feel snappy. There are no more lags and delays between clicking apps in the dock, opening pref panes, viewing folders, etc. Apps and windows launch and move around almost instantaneously, much like my Aluminum PowerBooks. Everything is beautifully accelerated with the Core-Image and Quartz Extreme enabled Radeon 9700.
Overall, the system feels quick(er). It does not feel like a 0.35Ghz Mac from 1999. Or at least not as you might expect.
Photoshop 7.0 takes 25 seconds to launch. The faster HDDs are great, but they are not going to work miracles; TenFourFox still takes a long time to get started and is heavy (slow) to use. TenFourKit is usable though and Camino is snappy as always.
Here is the Xbench results against the RAID:
As you can see, it doesn't blow anything out of the water, but it has made a substantial improvement and the ATA/66 bus is managing to push around a maximum of
52MB/sec on uncached 256k block sequential reads.
Here are the same test results against the original, late 1999 stock-standard 20GB IBM branded 5400rpm HDD:
For reference, the early 1999 stock
6GB Maxtor HDD, which was installed on the Beta (2nd) Sawtooth resulted in an Xbench disk test score of
18.32.
Overall, the operating noise is down and temps are good. The twin-2010 stock SATA drives are silent compared to the original 20GB (single) clunker. The reported temps are about the same as the older drives, but I can say that they feel cooler. There is no build-up of heat on the drive cases. They are cool to touch, even when Temperature Monitor says they are running at 41°C. In comparison, the older IDE drives (and SCSI for that matter) seem to generate a lot more heat.
In conclusion...
I am happy with the drives in this configuration. So far, I have experienced stability, increased performance and reduced running noise, all at a very low cost. A grand total of AU$42.00 for a 256GB striped 7200rpm RAID array, with PATA interfaces.
Considering the limitations of the ATA/66 interface, I can't imagine an SSD being vastly superior in this machine. I would have paid about AU$50 for a 64GB mSATA SSD, plus a SATA adapter, plus an IDE 3.5" adapter.
The only downside is I couldn't see how to use Disk Utility to partition the RAID volume, at least not in Panther or Tiger. There may be a way to do this from the command line, but I didn't look any deeper. I'm happy with Tiger on this G4, so a single volume, single OS Mac is what it is.
The original 20GB, plus the 6GB HDD are now in SawtoothBeta, which brings Mac OS X Server 1.2v3 back to life (using the supported Rage 128 Pro GPU) and I can use this G4 to switch between Server, Panther, Tiger, OS 9.2.2 and OS 8.6.
All in all, I saved a couple of perfectly fine SATA HDDs from going to landfill and put them to use in a way which they were never intended. And it works!
