Post Your SSD/CF SATA/PATA PowerPC Benchmark Results

[Amethyst1]

no with 2 higher end MPX cards the Mac Pro 7,1 has 12 Thunderbolt ports

We were talking about a 6,1 though

 

[ervus]

Do these SSD with IDE adapters slow down any as the drive fills up?

 

[B S Magnet]

Do these SSD with IDE adapters slow down any as the drive fills up?

I haven’t yet reached, say, 90 per cent of full drive capacity on the three PowerPC Macs I have running with internal IDE-to-SATA SSDs, but on two of the Macs there are system partitions running entirely on the data within that partition, whose partitions are in excess of 90 per cent full. I haven’t experienced a noticeable performance drop because of it.

In general, the bottleneck is always the IDE bus itself rather than what’s happening at the SSD controller level (which was designed for much quicker, more recent SATA I/II/III buses).

But as I near 95 or 98 per cent on those partitions, I’ll keep an eye out and mention it here if something does change.

 

[ervus]

In general, the bottleneck is always the IDE bus itself rather than what’s happening at the SSD...

Maybe I missed it, but can a PCI SATA card get around this bottleneck? I think I saw one of Action Retro's videos where there was no speed benefit compared to the IDE bus.

 

[MagicBoy]

Not really. Standard PCI 32-bit 33MHz bus runs at 133MB/sec and that's shared between all PCI devices, so a single SATA I SSD can saturate that. Some desktop Macs use faster PCI standards as usually found on workstations/servers ... but finding 64-bit 66MHz SATA controller is like hens teeth.

 

[ervus]

I found a highpoint card that seems to exceed 133MB/s with a SATA SSD attached. This is in an AGP G4 mac:

 

[MagicBoy]

Still miles off the 500+MB/sec potential of a modern SATA 3 SSD….

Although most of the perceived performance increase is a result of the near zero access time of solid state storage.

 

[Amethyst1]

Some desktop Macs use faster PCI standards as usually found on workstations/servers [...]

I found a highpoint card that seems to exceed 133MB/s with a SATA SSD attached. This is in an AGP G4 mac:

That machine has 64-bit 33MHz PCI slots, good for a theoretical maximum of 266MB/s.

 

[for this]

Maybe I missed it, but can a PCI SATA card get around this bottleneck? I think I saw one of Action Retro's videos where there was no speed benefit compared to the IDE bus.

This is a Console message from a SATA PCI (32-bit) card. It seems to be set at ATA-100 speed.

"25/11/2021 19:49:33 kernel FirmtekCtrllr::FT_ProcessNub: ATA100Support on device: 0"

By the way, speed is not the point for me, I just want to be able to install 3.5" drives on the location that has no room for an ATA to SATA adapter.

But yeah, if you use a PCI-X card, you can get the benefit of 64-bit connection in G4 PowerMacs.

 

[Amethyst1]

Still miles off the 500+MB/sec potential of a modern SATA 3 SSD….

SATA, schmata. PCIe is where it's at for SSDs.

 

[B S Magnet]

SATA, schmata. PCIe is where it's at for SSDs.

Heck yeah, I’m about five minutes away from ordering that PATA-to-PCIe adapter for my PowerBook on fbay.ocm! Woo-hoo!

 

[MagicBoy]

SATA, schmata. PCIe is where it's at for SSDs.

Yeah, upgrade priority #1 for a G4. Probably more processing power on the NVMe controller than the Mac. ?

 

[Wild Hare]

Three different approaches with G4 Mac mini.

Original Seagate 80 GB Spinner. / 1.42 GHz Mini
Ableconn sled with Zheino 120 GB mSATA. / 1.5 GHz Mini
AS331 V1.5 adapter bridge (SATA2IDE44VAO) with 1 TB Crucial SSD. / 1.42 GHz Mini

OS 9.2.2 - QuickBench 1.5 (left side)
Tiger 10.4.6 - XBench 1.3 (right side)

 

[B S Magnet]

Three different approaches with G4 Mac mini.

Original Seagate 80 GB Spinner. / 1.42 GHz Mini
Ableconn sled with Zheino 120 GB mSATA. / 1.5 GHz Mini
AS331 V1.5 adapter bridge (SATA2IDE44VAO) with 1 TB Crucial SSD. / 1.42 GHz Mini

OS 9.2.2 - QuickBench 1.5 (left side)
Tiger 10.4.6 - XBench 1.3 (right side)

View attachment 1997461

To make these data meaningful, drop in the Ableconn/Zheino into the 1.42GHz Mac Mini and run the bench tests again.

Next, drop the 1.5GHz results, as that’s a separate variable which departs from the other two data sets. Or, run bench on both the HDD and the AS331/Crucial in the 1.5GHz and post those alongside the 1.5GHz Ableconn/Zheino bench data.

 

[Wild Hare]

AS331 V1.5 / SATA2IDE44VAO adapter with a Crucial 1TB SSD in a 1.5 GHz G4 Mac Mini:



About the same, or just a bit less performance under OS 9...
yet some overall “Score” improvement with Tiger.

 

[ervus]

Here is a 64-bit PCI SATA card in a G4. It's noticeably quicker than the 32-bit versions. The chip it uses is a Sil3124 (is it SiL3124 or SiI3124?) and I've got an SSD hooked up to it. The card I have is from a Pee Cee and works with a driver but I've read that the firmtek cards used the same chip and had firmware that made the card bootable. Does anyone know how to flash these for Mac?

 

[Molon Labe]

MacMini G4 1.5GHz running Leopard 10.5.8
Benchmark on left: External Momobay CX2 with SSD via FireWire (Sandisk X600 mSATA with cheap 44pin IDE to mSATA adapter).
Benchmark on Right: Kingston SUV500 mSATA 480GB SSD with same cheap 44pin IDE to mSATA adapter.
BOTH BENCHMARKS MADE WITH MAC BOOTING FROM INTERNAL KINSGTON SSD.

EDIT: Both results were the first run on each disk. Running the benchmark several times gives a wide range of results. Sometimes the internal SSD would bench over 100MB/s (not possible with overhead). Other times one or more of the HD bench results would take a massive hit.

 

[ervus]

I saw this neat setup posted here:

www.journaldulapin.com/2021/12/18/m-2-pci-g4/

I can't read it very well, but I gather that it turns out to be not especially fast, or bootable:

 

[Amethyst1]

I can't read it very well, but I gather that it turns out to be not especially fast, or bootable:

It’s a Samsung SM951 AHCI PCIe SSD (recognised OOTB by Leopard’s AHCI driver) in an m.2-to-PCIe adapter in a PCIe-to-PCI bridge/adapter.

AHCI PCIe SSDs generally aren’t bootable on PPC Macs but are on Intel Macs.

 

[TzunamiOSX]

Would be nice to find a PCIX to PCIe Card to get more speed.

 

[Amethyst1]

Would be nice to find a PCIX to PCIe Card to get more speed.

Like this?

 

[DearthnVader]

It’s a Samsung SM951 AHCI PCIe SSD (recognised OOTB by Leopard’s AHCI driver) in an m.2-to-PCIe adapter in a PCIe-to-PCI bridge/adapter.

AHCI PCIe SSDs generally aren’t bootable on PPC Macs but are on Intel Macs.

So you have a m.2 keyed Samsung SM951 AHCI PCIe SSD and you have adapted that down to PCI?

As I have said before, we should be able to load the System from a suppoted boot disk on PowerPC and redirect this to the SSD as the root and user file system.

Tho others have tried this and reported it failed.

They did not go into detail on what exactly they tried when they did this, nor try to debug why it failed.

Maybe they tried to use XPF's "Helper Disk" function to do this, but this specific use case was likely never tested and debugged by Ryan.

So, I'm thinking we should start a new tread to see if we can figure out how to get it to work with Mac OS X and Linux as it should be possible on PPC, theoretically.......

Booting from AHCI SSD's on PowerPC using a redirect?

 

[Amethyst1]

So you have a m.2 keyed Samsung SM951 AHCI PCIe SSD and you have adapted that down to PCI?

I am not the author of the article. I just read it and translated the important bits.

 

[TzunamiOSX]

Like this?

yes, but buyable

 

[dextructor]

Finally taking some time to measure the performance. In this machine it's very consistent and in my PC with a real SATA III port the performance it's even better, so I couldn't recommend it more than that.

Specs:
iMac G5 2.1Ghz 20"
FireCuda 120 SSD 1TB SATA III