Success: SSD in Mini G4

[mxla]

Hello everybody,

I just wanted to share my experience with you if anyone has the same problem and is struggling with resolving it.

At our company, we needed a cheap and fast PPC-based computer running Linux, to test our code with. That's why we bought a used Mini G4 1.42. Unfortunately, the HDD died after some time and new 2.5" IDE HDDs are rather rare, expensive and slow.

Looking for a solution, I came across a converter for 2.5" IDE -> mSATA made by DeLock (part number 62495). With it, I ordered a Samsung 120GB mSATA drive. After disassembling the Mini (which wasn't too tough thanks to iFixit), I put in the converter and the drive, reassembled the box and turned it on again.

Surprisingly enough, everything worked right away! The G4 isn't the fastest computer at all, but there's a remarkable speed improvement with the SSD anyway. Unfortunately, I don't know if it would also work with OSX instead, but I guess it will.

So if you have an old Mini G4 that you want to revive or that needs a bit more speed, it's fairly easy using an SSD drive that costs about half of an IDE SSD.

-- Max

 

[ziggy29]

Good stuff. And yeah, there's no reason why this wouldn't work in OS X. As far as pretty much any OS goes, this looks like any other 120 GB IDE drive because of the hardware on board the adaptor.

 

[MikeatOSX]

Unfortunately, I don't know if it would also work with OSX instead, but I guess it will.

Yes it does.
I installed Mac OS X Server 10.4 Tiger on one partition and Server 10.5 Leopard on a second partition.
Both servers are working without problems on a Samsung mSATA.

 

[MikeatOSX]

BTW:
mSATA SSDs also are working on much older PowerBooks:
https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/27523-powerbook-1400c-and-msata-ssd/

 

[Dronecatcher]

What are you developing for Linux on PPC?

 

[bobesch]

My "Barbies Toilet Seat" sports that DeLock-mSATA mod too. Warm&silent.

 

[CooperBox]

I too have had good experience using the same DeLock converter (part number 62495).
For info, the identical converter can also be found under the name Lindy with an additional p/No. 20937.
I've used these DeLock/Lindy together with a Transcend mSATA drive, both in 64GB and 128GB, the latter being 64euros.
Has anyone tried the KingFast mSATA SSD,? I note it's very competitively priced at 48euros for 128GB.

 

[mxla]

@Dronecatcher: We developed some software for embedded boards. Nowadays, most of these are powered by an ARM processor (which uses mostly little endianess byte ordering) but one customer uses a PPC architecture (which is big endian). Since our software communicates with other devices, using the correct byte ordering is extremely important, so we have to test our code on multiple platforms.

Also, the GCC for PPC seems to behave a little bit different than the ones for other architectures, which helped us more than once to find strange bugs.