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SSD in PPC G4 15" runs SLOWER!

D

drzygote

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 10, 2011
6
0
Hi All
On a whim the other day I ordered a Transcend 32 gb IDE SSD, thinking it would make my ancient G4 PowerBook run a little faster. I have put it in, and running GarageSale (the main program I use on that mac), its much slower than the old 80Gb Toshiba 4200 rpm drive that came with the Mac.
Indeed, the Toshiba is quoted at maximum 100Mb/s read speed, whereas the Transcend is 80Mb/s read speed.
Is there something i am missing out? Obviously my lesson, is dont buy stuff before checking it out.
I am just wondering whether there is something that may be causing it to run even slower?
thanks in advance
 
not because it is called a ssd makes it automatically double as fast as a hdd , there are huge differences in read /write speeds and obvious in price of ssd's
as you pointed it out already toshiba's hdd will reach 100mb/s write speed while your transcend only will reach 80mb/s , and there is nothing you can do about it , and these are MAX speeds not average , because there is a difference as well , sorry but you successfully downgraded your PowerBook
you would have been better off with a 5400 rpm samsung spinpoint 2.5" pata(ide) hdd one of the fastest , you got fooled by the name SSD
or investing in a s-ata ssd with adapter , because the Max speeds are higher independent from the bus speed the Pata ssd's average around
the 50-60mb/s while the s-ata ssd's can reach around the 200mb/s

like i said in another post i get usually nearly a nervous breakdown if i hear the word maximum speed , as that usually means you never even get close to those speeds, was the same problem when usb2.0 got on the market the manufacturers usually praised it with its 480mb/s topspeed , but did not mention that even under ideal conditions these speed is unrealistic as only short peaks will reach 480mb/s and the same now with ssd , the word ssd alone gets people to buy it and expect 250mb/s speeds , but only a couple ssd's are reaching those speeds under ideal conditions, a reason why i settled for a velociraptor 600gb hdd (10000rpm) for my iMac instead of a ssd(soon gets transfered in my PowerMac G5 :)) , sure some ssd would be faster , but four times the price and a third of the capacity
 
Last edited:
Hi and thanks for your prompt replies.
I cloned the drive, so it's from an image. Do you think a clean install would perform better? If I don't sort it out soon, I'm going to have to eBay off what I bought and get a 5400 rpm IDE.
Is there anything else that might be causing it to slow?
Apart from that it's fine. Although Ubercaster (another program I use) now hangs and crashes for some reason.
I have repaired permissions and all that caper.
Cheers
Z
 
MacHamster68 said:
not because it is called a ssd makes it automatically double as fast as a hdd , there are huge differences in read /write speeds and obvious in price of ssd's
as you pointed it out already toshiba's hdd will reach 100mb/s write speed while your transcend only will reach 80mb/s , and there is nothing you can do about it , and these are MAX speeds not average , because there is a difference as well , sorry but you successfully downgraded your PowerBook
you would have been better off with a 5400 rpm samsung spinpoint 2.5" pata(ide) hdd one of the fastest , you got fooled by the name SSD
or investing in a s-ata ssd with adapter , because the Max speeds are higher independent from the bus speed the Pata ssd's average around
the 50-60mb/s while the s-ata ssd's can reach around the 200mb/s
Click to expand...

Wow! How about some fullstops and new sentences?
Anyhow, the 4200RPM 2.5" Toshiba mechanical drive will NEVER ever reach 100MB/s, 50 seems much more realistic. 133MB/s is the maximum throughput of PATA, given the age of the Powerbook, older PATA protocols (100MB/s, 66MB/s) might also be the case.

Anyhow, given not only sequential speeds of the SSD will be faster than the ones of the mechanical drive, random speeds (which matter the most) will undoubtedly be faster, which is why the SSD definitely won't be a downgrade.

MacHamster68 said:
like i said in another post i get usually nearly a nervous breakdown if i hear the word maximum speed , as that usually means you never even get close to those speeds, was the same problem when usb2.0 got on the market the manufacturers usually praised it with its 480mb/s topspeed , but did not mention that even under ideal conditions these speed is unrealistic as only short peaks will reach 480mb/s and the same now with ssd , the word ssd alone gets people to buy it and expect 250mb/s speeds , but only a couple ssd's are reaching those speeds under ideal conditions, a reason why i settled for a velociraptor 600gb hdd (10000rpm) for my iMac instead of a ssd(soon gets transfered in my PowerMac G5 :)) , sure some ssd would be faster , but four times the price and a third of the capacity
Click to expand...

You seem to totally mix up MB/s and Mb/s.
USB2.0 has a maximum throughput of 480Mb/s, which equals 60MB/s. Subtract the overhead and you'll end up with roughly 35MB/s in practice. This drastic difference from theory to practice, however, generally applies solely to USB. FW, Gigabit ethernet and other peripheral connections don't suffer that much from overhead (e.g.; FW800 theroretical 100MB/s, practice 80MB/s).

Anyhow, values around 250MB/s SSD vendors tend to release for their SSDs already are the throughput values the drives can reach (sequential speeds apparently as random speeds normally aren't used for advertising).
Just take a look at anandtechs SSD benches.
Another example: my Intel SSD is advertised with 250MB/s / 100MB/s sequential speeds, and that is exactly what the drive offers.
That has nothing to do with ideal circumstances, it simply is the sequential performance the drive offers. And unless you're buying an SSD with out-dated controllers (two to three year old models), that performance will remain as modern SSDs do not suffer from performance degradation any more.

Please don't mix up random and sequential speeds here. Again the 250MB/s only apply for sequential read speeds. Random speeds are way lower (still multitudes of those mechanical drives offer) for SATA II drives.
SATA 6Gb/s drives easily reach this number for random speeds as well, but that would go too far here as we're still talking PATA in this thread. ;)

Long story short: OP, please to a clean install on the SSD.
 
Hi, and thanks for all of your help.
I tried a clean install, and it was still slow.
I ran XBench, and these are the Disk results:

............................... HD............SSD
Sequential:
Uncached Write:........43.01.........18.62
Uncached Write:........42.31.........14.30
Uncached Read:........82.78..........6.67
Uncached Read:........47.54.........31.48
Random:
Uncached Write:.........6.26...........0.63
Uncached Write:........38.91..........9.56
Uncached Read:.........55.21..........2.16
Uncached Read:.........69.15........32.68

As you can see, the SSD fails at all stages compared to the stock Toshiba 4200rpm drive which is from 2004.

As I said, this is after a clean OSX (Erased the disk) install.

If anyone can point something out to me that Im missing, please let me know. Otherwise, I am returning the SSD straight away and getting a 5200rpm IDE drive.

drzygote
 
Transporteur said:
Wow! How about some fullstops and new sentences?
Anyhow, the 4200RPM 2.5" Toshiba mechanical drive will NEVER ever reach 100MB/s, 50 seems much more realistic. 133MB/s is the maximum throughput of PATA, given the age of the Powerbook, older PATA protocols (100MB/s, 66MB/s) might also be the case.

Anyhow, given not only sequential speeds of the SSD will be faster than the ones of the mechanical drive, random speeds (which matter the most) will undoubtedly be faster, which is why the SSD definitely won't be a downgrade.



You seem to totally mix up MB/s and Mb/s.
USB2.0 has a maximum throughput of 480Mb/s, which equals 60MB/s. Subtract the overhead and you'll end up with roughly 35MB/s in practice. This drastic difference from theory to practice, however, generally applies solely to USB. FW, Gigabit ethernet and other peripheral connections don't suffer that much from overhead (e.g.; FW800 theroretical 100MB/s, practice 80MB/s).

Anyhow, values around 250MB/s SSD vendors tend to release for their SSDs already are the throughput values the drives can reach (sequential speeds apparently as random speeds normally aren't used for advertising).
Just take a look at anandtechs SSD benches.
Another example: my Intel SSD is advertised with 250MB/s / 100MB/s sequential speeds, and that is exactly what the drive offers.
That has nothing to do with ideal circumstances, it simply is the sequential performance the drive offers. And unless you're buying an SSD with out-dated controllers (two to three year old models), that performance will remain as modern SSDs do not suffer from performance degradation any more.

Please don't mix up random and sequential speeds here. Again the 250MB/s only apply for sequential read speeds. Random speeds are way lower (still multitudes of those mechanical drives offer) for SATA II drives.
SATA 6Gb/s drives easily reach this number for random speeds as well, but that would go too far here as we're still talking PATA in this thread. ;)

Long story short: OP, please to a clean install on the SSD.
Click to expand...


not all SSD are faster then a HDD only because you name that thing SSD , especially P-ATA SSD are usually not even close or just on par with HDD (see some early netbooks with SSD), they had often been even far slower then HDD , and reinstalling does not make those faster, and the real fast SSD's are quiet expensive
 
OP, something is wrong with this SSD. I have this model too and it isn't that slow. I'll try some benches and will post results for comparison. Mine is installed in Clamshell, so results may slightly vary (due to slower ATA in iBook) - yours definitely should be much higher.

Did you buy it new or used? If new with warranty - return it IMO.
 
Hi, I bought it new.
When I installed it, I took the jumper off completely.
Should I have set it as the master?
I looked at the HDD in the mac, it had no jumper, so I took the jumper off.
Could that be it?
Thanks for your help guys
Z
 
MacHamster68 said:
not all SSD are faster then a HDD only because you name that thing SSD , especially P-ATA SSD are usually not even close or just on par with HDD (see some early netbooks with SSD), they had often been even far slower then HDD , and reinstalling does not make those faster, and the real fast SSD's are quiet expensive
Click to expand...

Can't argue that SSD doesn't necessarily mean fast drive (there are really bad drives out there) and I don't know the drive the OP has.
However, the performance rating of current SSDs pretty much conforms with what the vendors advertise with. Just wanted to say that.

Real fast SSDs being expensive always depends on what the individual considers expensive. Personally, I think the SSDs that are currently on the market are stupid cheap for what you get.
The performance you gain from other, far more expensive upgrades like processors, RAM, graphics cards etc. doesn't even come close to what you get from a SSD in overall computing performance.
Heck, high end SSD storage comes close to 1€/USD these days. That is stupid cheap compared to what we paid one or two years ago. I took 400€ out of my wallet for a 160GB Intel G2 two years ago. Ouch! Worth every cent, though!

Anyhow, just wanted go get the facts about transfer rates right in my above post. ;)
 
The Powerbook G4s had extremely slow drive buses. Putting an SSD into one is a waste, you can't get close to the bandwidth you need for SSD to make a difference.

For example, the current Macbooks have SATA-6.0, which is about 8 times faster than the drive bus in a Powerbook G4. The Powerbook G4 bus, meantime, is 100 megabytes a second, which is not even fast enough to take advantage of modern hard drives, much less an SSD...
 
drzygote said:
Hi, I bought it new.
When I installed it, I took the jumper off completely.
Should I have set it as the master?
I looked at the HDD in the mac, it had no jumper, so I took the jumper off.
Could that be it?
Thanks for your help guys
Z
Click to expand...

No, the jumpers control whether the drive is set to the first drive or the second drive of the connection chain. It has nothing to do with speed.
 
Hi, well I pit it back in and set it as the master.
The Xbench results were much better. Will post them later when I get home.
Some were into the hundreds. Although some were slower than my HD.
Garagesale was still slow though, so it looks like a newer iDE HD is the option.
Cheers
 
Your wrong

goMac said:
The Powerbook G4s had extremely slow drive buses. Putting an SSD into one is a waste, you can't get close to the bandwidth you need for SSD to make a difference.

For example, the current Macbooks have SATA-6.0, which is about 8 times faster than the drive bus in a Powerbook G4. The Powerbook G4 bus, meantime, is 100 megabytes a second, which is not even fast enough to take advantage of modern hard drives, much less an SSD...
Click to expand...


Hello, I just purchased the SSD 128GB from OWC and I have the last powerbook G4 1.67 and this drive has made a tremendous difference in my access speed and reads.. Maybe for the lower end powerbook G4's it doesn't give good performance, but for mine I get excellent results.. Not bad for a PATA SSD Legacy drive..

Highly recommended, and since I got it for 150.00
 
Joshuarocks said:
Hello, I just purchased the SSD 128GB from OWC and I have the last powerbook G4 1.67 and this drive has made a tremendous difference in my access speed and reads.. Maybe for the lower end powerbook G4's it doesn't give good performance, but for mine I get excellent results.. Not bad for a PATA SSD Legacy drive..

Highly recommended, and since I got it for 150.00
Click to expand...

It's possible that the older drive was slower, but a good modern hard disk should be able to achieve the same speeds. Hard disks can generally transfer faster than the ATA/100 bus can handle these days.
 
^^^ None of these "modern hard disks" can be installed in PB, so where's their advantage? All are using SATA, and SATA->PATA adapters won't fit in PB. Only one which will fit, is Slim SATA -> 2.5 " IDE adapter. It adds possibility to install 1.8" SSD in PB.
None of PATA 2.5" mechanical drives (even 7200 ones) can max out ATA100. None of them has almost zero access time. At least I've never seen any.
Not to mention about less noise, heat and slightly lower battery consumption with SSDs.

Using SSD in PB is a waste equal to using PB at all ;) It can be considered as waste only from financial POV, but from technical it's the best what you can do to speed up your old aluminum friend. Especially if you've done everything else before.
 
I don't think I wasted my money

666sheep said:
^^^ None of these "modern hard disks" can be installed in PB, so where's their advantage? All are using SATA, and SATA->PATA adapters won't fit in PB. Only one which will fit, is Slim SATA -> 2.5 " IDE adapter. It adds possibility to install 1.8" SSD in PB.
None of PATA 2.5" mechanical drives (even 7200 ones) can max out ATA100. None of them has almost zero access time. At least I've never seen any.
Not to mention about less noise, heat and slightly lower battery consumption with SSDs.

Using SSD in PB is a waste equal to using PB at all ;) It can be considered as waste only from financial POV, but from technical it's the best what you can do to speed up your old aluminum friend. Especially if you've done everything else before.
Click to expand...


You my friend don't even have the same powerbook as me, plus you aren't OWC or Powerbook medic.com, so don't hand me that crap that the OWC PATA LEGACY is not worth it.. I got mine wholesale for 150.00 - unlike most people, I have ways of getting stuff at wholesale price..

And since you don't have the same set up as me, your ignorance makes you full of assumptions of fallacy, since I have the OWC 128GB Pata ssd legacy drive and I notice a big big difference between it and the 5400 120GB stock drive.

Do the world a favor.. leave this forum because you are no friend to those who still hold on to their powerpc macs.. BTW, I own 5 INTEL MAC PRO 2010 models and I happen to love both intel and powerpc equally.. But I know judging from your posts you are not supportive of those who still use powerpc machines...

Unless you are OWC or powerbook medic.com or a tech, don't tell me I wasted my money.. because i clearly didn't.
 
Drive which I owned..

goMac said:
It's possible that the older drive was slower, but a good modern hard disk should be able to achieve the same speeds. Hard disks can generally transfer faster than the ATA/100 bus can handle these days.
Click to expand...

The drive I originally had was a 120GB stock 5400 pata drive.. After installing the OWC PATA LEGACY 128GB, I noticed a huge difference in performance and speed - and it is noticable and it works.. OWC DOES NOT LIE..
 
Joshuarocks said:
You my friend don't even...(crap, crap crap)
Click to expand...

You my troll, should READ what you quote, BEFORE you quote it, I highly recommend it to you. If you don't understand what you've read - read once more. It helps slow people to understand even simple sentences. This way you can avoid being ridiculous in the future...
 
Joshuarocks said:
The drive I originally had was a 120GB stock 5400 pata drive.. After installing the OWC PATA LEGACY 128GB, I noticed a huge difference in performance and speed - and it is noticable and it works.. OWC DOES NOT LIE..
Click to expand...

Yeah, 5400 rpm drives can't saturate PATA, but a 7200 rpm hard drive certainly can.

A 7200 RPM hard drive is a much better deal on a Powerbook G4 than an SSD.
 
goMac said:
Yeah, 5400 rpm drives can't saturate PATA, but a 7200 rpm hard drive certainly can.

A 7200 RPM hard drive is a much better deal on a Powerbook G4 than an SSD.
Click to expand...

Could you please post link to at least one 2.5" 7200 rpm HDD with PATA bus, which saturates ATA 100?
 
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