I installed today a 120GB Kingston SSD msata into my Powerbook G4 1,5:
Original Hitachi 60GB speed was 39.
Original Hitachi 60GB speed was 39.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Post Your SSD/CF SATA/PATA PowerPC Benchmark Results
- Thread starter AphoticD
- WikiPost WikiPost
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
- Status
To my surprise the prices have dropped a lot, I found a 240 GB Kingston SUV500MS for 50 EUR whereas previously my 64GB mSATA SSD cost nearly 35-40 EUR , upgrading my PB 12" for MacPorts , more VM's and for the PowerPC Challenge.
Hopefully I can also fix my 2nd PB 12" which died (heatsink loose) after my attempt to upgrade to a Hynix 64GB mSATA SSD, aaah, challenges ...
Hopefully I can also fix my 2nd PB 12" which died (heatsink loose) after my attempt to upgrade to a Hynix 64GB mSATA SSD, aaah, challenges ...
So in light of the upcoming Challenge and needing a clean install for Macports so I can fork smtube and become it's co-maintaner and always needing space for Virtual Machines
an upgrade from the above to a Kingston mSATA SSD 240Gb .
Machine: Powerbook G4 1,5 Ghz
SSD: Kingston UV500 mSATA 240 GB
scored from a nearby shop since I could pick it up returning from work.
(Dutch/Flemish website)
https://www.alternate.be/Kingston/UV500-240-GB-SSD/html/product/1445031?lk=7964
Adapter: Lindy mSATA to IDE adapter
scored from Amazon.de since it was unavailable near by for another 3 weeks
https://www.amazon.de/LINDY-mSATA-Z...id=1549039574&sr=8-1&keywords=lindy+msata+ide
Purchased: January 2019
Price: 49 EUR for the mSATA SSD picked up locally
45 EUR for the adapter from Amazon.de
Energy Saving: Highest Processor Performance
On charger:
On battery:
Speed is 3-4x the IDE SSD, machine feels snappier but still haven't thrown any large VM's with lots of loading onto it, battery (Newertech) life does seems to suffer more now.
Here is the IDE SSD benchmark from 2015
As an Amazon Associate, MacRumors earns a commission from qualifying purchases made through links in this post.
Last year I reported 301.40 on Leopard on my Quad G5 using the internal bus connected to an SSD. Today I obtained a Seritek 2ME4-2 eSATA card on the cheap and tested it out.
Using a spare Samsung EVO 850 inside a Vantec NexStar eSATA enclosure (it also does USB 3.0) and hooking it the enclosure as an external drive to the eSATA ports I just installed.
When I looked at raw throughput via QuickBench and ZoneBench (from Intech's Speedtools), it was much faster than the internal SSD-in-enclosure was (up to about 220 MB/s on reads versus about 135 MB/s)...
but the XBench disk test barely moved, up to 305.79.
Using a spare Samsung EVO 850 inside a Vantec NexStar eSATA enclosure (it also does USB 3.0) and hooking it the enclosure as an external drive to the eSATA ports I just installed.
When I looked at raw throughput via QuickBench and ZoneBench (from Intech's Speedtools), it was much faster than the internal SSD-in-enclosure was (up to about 220 MB/s on reads versus about 135 MB/s)...
but the XBench disk test barely moved, up to 305.79.
Machine: PowerBook G4 17" 1.67GHz DLSD (A1139/PowerBook5,9)
SSD: Dogfish 256GB NGFF m.2 2280 SSD (via IDE-to-m.2 adapter)
Purchased: April 2019
Price: total in USD, $46.44 (CAD$60 + CAD$12)
Disk only Xbench results (regular boot, running GyazMail and TFF in the background, network off)
The combo makes an interesting, but not offensive, chirp when hitting the first Random Uncached Read, and if pressing one’s ear to where the drive is, it’s possible to hear the read/write oscillations.
[doublepost=1555592135][/doublepost]
Added: the Xbench disk test portion of the whole test from before the HDD-to-SSD upgrade, from a Hitachi 7200rpm 100GB OEM HDD, was 36.10.
SSD: Dogfish 256GB NGFF m.2 2280 SSD (via IDE-to-m.2 adapter)
Purchased: April 2019
Price: total in USD, $46.44 (CAD$60 + CAD$12)
Disk only Xbench results (regular boot, running GyazMail and TFF in the background, network off)
The combo makes an interesting, but not offensive, chirp when hitting the first Random Uncached Read, and if pressing one’s ear to where the drive is, it’s possible to hear the read/write oscillations.
[doublepost=1555592135][/doublepost]
Machine: PowerBook G4 17" 1.67GHz DLSD (A1139/PowerBook5,9)
SSD: Dogfish 256GB NGFF m.2 2280 SSD (via IDE-to-m.2 adapter)
Purchased: April 2019
Price: total in USD, $46.44 (CAD$60 + CAD$12)
Disk only Xbench results (regular boot, running GyazMail and TFF in the background, network off)
The combo makes an interesting, but not offensive, chirp when hitting the first Random Uncached Read, and if pressing one’s ear to where the drive is, it’s possible to hear the read/write oscillations.
Added: the Xbench disk test portion of the whole test from before the HDD-to-SSD upgrade, from a Hitachi 7200rpm 100GB OEM HDD, was 36.10.
That's with an Kingston mSATA-SSD, I'd say m.2 is not really faster
Attachments
That isn’t the point.
Here is the point:
The present offerings, availability, and prices for m.2 NGFF SSDs, at least where I live, generally outnumber what’s presently available for mSATA SSDs. Were this not the case, I would have echoed exactly what I did a year ago when I bought an IDE-to-mSATA adapter and an mSATA SSD for my clamshell iBook.
We good?
~200 points appears to be the PBG4’s speed limit regardless of the underlying SSD tech.
I haven’t been on the market looking for any SSDs recently, so it’s great to see m.2 options performing as expected (and at a good price point) in the old hardware.
The upside of keeping up with the interfaces is forward compatibility of the component in newer hardware (or PCIe interfaces and USB caddies).
I haven’t been on the market looking for any SSDs recently, so it’s great to see m.2 options performing as expected (and at a good price point) in the old hardware.
The upside of keeping up with the interfaces is forward compatibility of the component in newer hardware (or PCIe interfaces and USB caddies).
Now I get it
just checked and you are right!! I must have missed a recent drop in cost per GB as the last time I checked mSATA still was the better option and I hesitated to switch to m.2
PowerBook G4 1.5 GHz 15" A1106
LiteOn 64GB mSATA in generic IDE adapter
2GB RAM
Purchased in UK £75 ($98) May 2019
Cheers
Hugh
LiteOn 64GB mSATA in generic IDE adapter
2GB RAM
Purchased in UK £75 ($98) May 2019
Cheers
Hugh
As I currently have a 1.67GHz 15" with a 128GB mSata in a cheap ebay adaptor, 1.67GHz 17" with a 256GB mSata in a Lindy adaptor and a 1.5GHz 12" with a 250GB IDE WD HDD I thought I'd do some comparisons to see how they all perform. I was mainly interested to see the difference between the eBay adaptor and the Lindy one. Both mSata drives were Samsung PM851.
The Lineup:
PB G4 17" (SLSD) 1.67GHz, 2GB DDR, 256GB Samsung PM851 in Lindy adaptor, High res screen swap, Leopard:
PB G4 15" (SLSD) 1.67GHz, 2GB DDR, 128GB Samsung PM851 in cheap £5 ebay adaptor, Tiger:
And as a comparison with one of the faster traditional HDDs available
PB G4 12" 1.5GHz, 1.25GB DDR, 250GB WD HDD:
As you can see the cheap eBay adaptors get more or less the same performance, I originally had issues getting it working but the issue was simply that by default they run as Master which G4 Macs don't seem to like, adding a jumper pin to make it the Cable Select configuration made it work. It's definitely a good way to save some money with an mSata upgrade. I used the kind with the white plastic cover.
The Lineup:
PB G4 17" (SLSD) 1.67GHz, 2GB DDR, 256GB Samsung PM851 in Lindy adaptor, High res screen swap, Leopard:
PB G4 15" (SLSD) 1.67GHz, 2GB DDR, 128GB Samsung PM851 in cheap £5 ebay adaptor, Tiger:
And as a comparison with one of the faster traditional HDDs available
PB G4 12" 1.5GHz, 1.25GB DDR, 250GB WD HDD:
As you can see the cheap eBay adaptors get more or less the same performance, I originally had issues getting it working but the issue was simply that by default they run as Master which G4 Macs don't seem to like, adding a jumper pin to make it the Cable Select configuration made it work. It's definitely a good way to save some money with an mSata upgrade. I used the kind with the white plastic cover.
Off the top of my head (as its now all reassembled) it was the top two pins. I googled 2.5 IDE jumper pins and followed the first layout I saw despite there being a few different ones, I guess I got lucky.
relatively recent 12" Powerbook G4 867Mhz ebay score. The innolite msata gets solid scores except for that first random uncached write sequence. Tanks the score super fierce. Must be the cheap mSata I scored off ebay.
Oh well no worries
Oh well no worries
Last edited:
Dropped a 30gb Samsung msata into my MDD today. Much better SSD scores than the crappy innolite.
I recently bought an adapter for using microSD cards in place of a CF card. I bought this mainly due to the fact that large capacity microSD cards are much cheaper than CF cards of the same size, but I also wanted to see how the speed of this adapter compares to a standard ATA hard disk and a single standard CF card. This was especially interesting because the adapter boasts its ability to use two microSD cards in RAID 0. So here are the results, all on a fresh install of Tiger on a 300MHz Power Mac G3.
First is a 20GB Western Digital hard disk drive. I also timed its boot time at 1:15.81
Next was a standard, and very well used, 4GB Kingston CF card. Boot time was 1:27.67
After this I used a single microSD card in the dual microSD adapter. Boot time was 1:00.42.
And finally I used the microSD adapter with two microSD cards in RAID 0. Boot time was 58:06.
Overall I am pretty happy with the microSD to CF adapter. The total cost of getting two 32GB microSD cards, a CF to IDE adapter, and the aforementioned adapter itself was only about $40 AUD.
First is a 20GB Western Digital hard disk drive. I also timed its boot time at 1:15.81
Next was a standard, and very well used, 4GB Kingston CF card. Boot time was 1:27.67
After this I used a single microSD card in the dual microSD adapter. Boot time was 1:00.42.
And finally I used the microSD adapter with two microSD cards in RAID 0. Boot time was 58:06.
Overall I am pretty happy with the microSD to CF adapter. The total cost of getting two 32GB microSD cards, a CF to IDE adapter, and the aforementioned adapter itself was only about $40 AUD.
Thanks for sharing your results @Dharumanyo. I recently bought a single Micro-SD to CF adapter and a CF to 3.5" IDE adapter for my Sawtooth G4 with similar results. I think it is a good (cheap) solution for older Mac desktops, but I was unable to get the 2.5" CF -> IDE adapters to work for my PowerBooks.
Thanks for sharing your results. They show RAID 0 isn't worth the increased risk in that case.
I've been using a couple of them for a while. I will have to benchmark them later on. I find the common cheap CF to laptop IDE drives are hit and miss. I have one that works consistently in my PowerBook 1400, but I also have multiple ones that simply do not work with any laptops despite nothing being obviously wrong with them. I have a more expensive CF adapter in my PowerBook G4 which I have had better results with.
Sandisk Ultra. Chosen simply because they were cheap. Though I don't imagine a better microSD would improve things significantly, since it would probably be bottlenecked by the CF interface.
Agreed. It would be good if this adapter had the option of using two SD cards in a master/slave configuration.
With this test I'm seeing ~300 in my powerbook for whatever reason. I've tried 3 different SSDs with the cheapo mSATA to IDE converter and I get similar results.
My personal test is to time how long it takes to duplicate a 30GB movie folder. I was trying to see if there's a difference between the Quicksilver optical drive bus, the HDD bus, and a PCI card. I also tried software RAID setups with two drives on the same cable vs two drives on two cables.
No idea what it was before other than slow af. 256GB Zheino in a IDE enclosure. 60$ total on Amazon.
