Q: Considering buying 128GB PATA SSD for 12" PowerBook G4

I've had no problems so far, all running nice and fast. This drive/ adapter combo should work in any notebook 44 pin IDE/pata system. I plugged it into a dell latitude d610 to do the dos based firmware upgrade and even than worked fine without any issues. It's a bit of work to swap the drive as you can see on the ifixit site but if you're up for it well worth it. For the price a brilliant upgrade considering the cost of a new MacBook.

Will this adapter you have fit in the 17 inch powerbook, model 9970 - Hi res powerbook G4 DDR2?

The adapter converts a micro-sata drive like a Crucial RealSSD C300 the one I used although you may want to go with one that does garbage collection like a OCZ drive if you do lots of work as OS X 10.5 doesn't support TRIM and even if it did I'm not too sure if TRIM would operate through the adapter.

Hi romko23, I read one of your earlier posts about one of the other adapters you had looked at which would not have worked due to the size of the adapter and also the size of the SATA drive. The adapter would have to be built into the connecter cable to fit between the SATA drive and the IDE interface as there really is no room for both of them in the drive bay. I decided to try and find an adapter for a MICRO-SATA 1.8 inch drive instead as the capacities, speed and price were all the same as with their 2.5 inch versions. The 1.8 inch can also be moved into a new notebook using SATA1/2/3 ports with a very simple pass through adapter. With the 1.8 inch MICRO-SATA drive and adapter combined the result is actually smaller than a 2.5 inch 44-pin IDE drive so all I needed to do was find a way of stopping the drive from rattling around in the machine which I did by placing some foam around the sides of it carefully not to block any air vents.

Ok, but with this adapter I would then be able to take advantage of real SATA speed as the adapter would be converting the PATA signal to a SATA, right? I think thats what you are implying. Are there any 128GB SSD drives in 1.8 inch?

You are correct, no matter how fast the sata drive is, once you pass it through an IDE/PATA adapter you are limited to the transfer speeds of that bus. You will however get the best possible performance out of the bus far better than any disk based drive. There are several options for 128GB 1.8 inch SSD's wiht options from Crucial, OCZ, Kingston and Intel.

I installed the same SSD ( Transcend 64GB) as blazzr in my Powerbook and it freezes every time I wake it up from sleep mode.

I'd like to do the MASTER/SLAVE change too but I don't know which part has to be cut from the cable. Can someone explain it in more detail to me? Or give a link to an instruction in the internet?

Would be great, since I an't put my Laptop to sleep for two months now....

Oley

You are very welcome. If you have further questions please feel free to start a new topic.

Best wishes.

cornelius

I just wanted to add that I have had issues installing Leopard on my PowerBook with a Mercury SSD. I think the drive is incompatable.  https://discussions.apple.com/message/15616319#15616319

Hi, I just want to comment on nocr's post, and give some general feedback. I've just installed a 40Gb OWC Mercury PATA IDE in my PB 12" 1.5GHz, and it's working fine! I cloned the original HD rather than reinstalling Leopard. No freezing after waking from sleep, spookily silent, noticeably faster, and benchmarks fantastic! I debated for a long time whether or not to get a Kingspec SSD, but I'm glad I went for this one. I also used it in a Mac Mini G4, and it worked equally well.

Andrew

Did you actually try this, AND can you confirm that the Combodrive still works properly then?

I have opened my iBook already a few times, and I doubt it will survive much more tweaks.

So I could do this, but if then I notice that my combodrive isn't working anymore, I will have to open the iBook AGAIN and I am afraid that will be too much.

I hope you can tell me that the Combodrive still works after setting internal drive to MASTER with jumpers.

I changed the stock 60GB HDD by a 64GB KingSpec SSD from eBay on my PBG4 12"/1.33ghz/1.25gb. Performances are great with Leopard, definitely worth it, the system feels much more usable now.

I also had the hang after wake-up problem with Leopard (no issue with Tiger). The solution proposed by blazzr worked like a charm! I chosed to bend the pins on the SSD and solder them together to force the Master mode intead of modifying the PATA cable. The cable still fits nicely after the modification.

The Combo drive is still working fine after the modification.

Yes!

In my iBook G4, 12" 1.33Ghz I was surprised to see that the PATA connector in the iBook was not mounted over the MASTER/SLAVE jumper pins, so I had to modify nothing (lucky me)

ComboDrive keeps working indeed.

Only weird thing is that my SSD seems to slow down incredibily as soon as another task is using the harddrive. As long as one program uses the harddisk it is incredible fast, but as soon as something else is going on (like dropbox sync) it slows down to almost unusable speed. Very odd since my 'normal' 60GB harddrive had no problems with combining tasks. I have 1GB in the iBook G4 and Running Tiger 10.4.11

Another big trouble is Safari 4. As soon as that program has eaten all the free memory, the SSD slows down to unusable speed (SLOW!!). Now I use TenFourFox which works much much better on the iBook G4, compared to Safari 4.

Overall I'm glad I did this upgrade (to ssd) and the fix with the set-jumper-to-master!

Thanks people here on Apple Discussions! This was very helpful!