SSDs and OS 9?

[InuNacho]

Hello all, I recently bought an IDE to SATA Adapter - Marvell-88SA8052 for my PowerMac G4 933MHz Quicksilver. I plan to clone over my 10.4 and OS 9 partitions on a 300GB IDE drive to a SSD but am unsure about things like garbage collection and drive life.
I bought my first Samsung SSD for my old Mac Pro 4,1 in 2012 for I want to say $450 for 256GB. It was good a for a while until it bogged down and I used TRIM ENABLER to speed things back up again. Now I know there has been some advances in SSD technology over the past decade. Since Mac OS never natively took care of garbage collection I had to use TRIM ENABLER on my Pro until I switched to a 2018 Mini where the drive is soldered on and has the Apple blessing.

My question is, how does OS 9 work with SSDs? Will a modern one with new garbage collection baked into the drive itself be good enough or is there utilities out there for SSDs?
I have a few older SSDs lying around that I would like to use instead of spending money on a new drive, would that be alright on its own?

Thanks!

 

[SamC741]

I thinks you can use your old SSD, the new one won't make too much difference.

 

[lepidotós]

Can't speak for a 2.5" SATA, but Mac OS 9.0.0 boots and functions flawlessly on my IDE to CF (installed in Donatello), and Classic works equally flawlessly with my IDE to mSATA I put in Benbridge.​

 

[ww2_1943]

This is something I spent a lot of time researching this, but I am still not 100% sure of my answers, so take this all with a grain of salt. Maybe others can chime in.

Unless you are using the machine frequently, it will likely never be an issue. The drive slow down occurs from data you delete vs writing, so I try to remain conscious of that.

A lot of people claim that the built in garbage collection will take care of itself. I use cheap DogFish SSDs and I cannot find any solid information on if they have garbage collection and if it really works.

I've tried to find a way to connect the drive to a newer Mac through USB 2 or FireWire and run an app like Trim Enabler and from what I gather, it won't work on externally mounted drives.

Some people have mentioned running trim in Linux. I need to research that more. I want to know if I can run trim on an externally mounted drive. I plan on installing a second drive in my G5 just for Linux. I will experiment from there.

 

[eyoungren]

Hello all, I recently bought an IDE to SATA Adapter - Marvell-88SA8052 for my PowerMac G4 933MHz Quicksilver. I plan to clone over my 10.4 and OS 9 partitions on a 300GB IDE drive to a SSD but am unsure about things like garbage collection and drive life.
I bought my first Samsung SSD for my old Mac Pro 4,1 in 2012 for I want to say $450 for 256GB. It was good a for a while until it bogged down and I used TRIM ENABLER to speed things back up again. Now I know there has been some advances in SSD technology over the past decade. Since Mac OS never natively took care of garbage collection I had to use TRIM ENABLER on my Pro until I switched to a 2018 Mini where the drive is soldered on and has the Apple blessing.

My question is, how does OS 9 work with SSDs? Will a modern one with new garbage collection baked into the drive itself be good enough or is there utilities out there for SSDs?
I have a few older SSDs lying around that I would like to use instead of spending money on a new drive, would that be alright on its own?

Thanks!

As a general rule of thumb, it was suggested by @weckart that at least 25% of your total SSD capacity be left empty to allow for the drive firmware GC.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/17-powerbook-g4-gets-new-msata3-ssd.2165748/page-2?post=27026891#post-27026891

 

[InuNacho]

Thanks for the responses.
Hmm, it seems it may not be worth the effort to put in an SSD in after all. This Quicksilver is my OS 9 gaming machine and Vuescan Nikon LS-2000 scanning computer. I can put in a modern spinning drive and be ok for some time I suppose.

 

[Amethyst1]

I've tried to find a way to connect the drive to a newer Mac through USB 2 or FireWire and run an app like Trim Enabler and from what I gather, it won't work on externally mounted drives.

On macOS, it definitely works for internal SSDs and external AHCI/NVMe SSDs connected via Thunderbolt. For FireWire- and USB-attached drives, it supposedly depends on whether the bridge chip supports the TRIM command.

 

[ww2_1943]

On macOS, it definitely works for internal SSDs and external AHCI/NVMe SSDs connected via Thunderbolt. For FireWire- and USB-attached drives, it supposedly depends on whether the bridge chip supports the TRIM command.

I have to keep researching it. Maybe I can use a FireWire to Thunderbolt adapter. For example, put my G5 into target disk mode and connect it to my M1 Mac and then run trim on the connected drive.