PATA SSD in Powerbook G4 PPC, Mac OS X 10.5.8.
Howdy folks and thanks for reading. Just wanted to post a summary of my successful mission to install an SSD in my ancient Apple Macintosh Powerbook G4.
- Apple Macintosh Powerbook G4 15 inch, 1.25 GHz PPC, 2GB RAM, Panasonic UJ-85JS as superdrive upgrade, aluminum case.
- Mac OS X 10.5.8 Leopard.
I chose the Transcend model TS128GPSD320 128GB PATA 2.5 inch SSD. Another one I looked at was the Kingspec 128GB PATA. I went with the Transcend because of price and availability.
First I backed up the existing hard drive as a .dmg using Disk Utility. Free alternatives are CC CLoner and SuperDuper. Commercial variants include Clone X, Data Rescue, and CopyCat.
Next I attached the Transcend SSD via USB using one of those external adapters that let you plug in 5.25/3.5/2.5/PATA/SATA drives.
I performed a format as HFS, Journaling, APM, zero all sectors. Yup I know that it is not advised to perform a low level format of an SSD, but I came across some posts about 'seasoning' an SSD for use. An SSD can take thousands of write cycles and so I figured by doing a zero all sectors, any bad blocks will be caught and spared out right away.
Next I cloned the existing hard drive to the SSD using Disk Utility.
Installation was smooth as the Transcend had the exact same dimensions as the existing 80GB Toshiba IDE electromechanical HDD. One difference was the Transcend needed a jumper to be set as master while most regular 2.5" drives have no jumper present for master disk mode. I did see a post from someone who had problems with their SSD until they put the jumper back on as master (or CS). The SSD seemed weird because it is this plain, smooth box that weighs a fraction of a HDD and so it seemed, well, flimsy. Also, there were absolutely no sounds and no heat could be felt during the formatting and cloning operations.
After the backup, format, clone and swap were done, the Powerbook booted up with no problems. I immediately turned off system sleep. Sleep would cause everything in memory to be written to the SSD then deleted upon exiting sleep. Unnecessary write cycles, right? Again, I had seen posts from others who had performance issues with their SSD with sleep enabled.
I had done lots of research about SSD before hand. My issues were: a) Was it worth the expense to put such a nice drive in an old PPC machine? b) The performance degradation issue over time. c) Reliability.
I used the Aja utility to measure read and write speeds. The original 4200 RPM hard drive averaged about 50MB/sec read, 30MB/sec write. The Transcend SSD averaged about 70MB/sec read, 50MB/sec write probably because of no latency and a much faster controller interface. So I am getting full performance from the system IDE bus. In fact, that is a bottleneck since the TS128GPSD320 is capable of the latest ATA standard.
I did not experience a faster boot up. I tried setting the SSD as the boot drive in Startup Disk, but it made no improvement. No difference in shutdown time either. There was vast improvement in the time to launch applications, however. I am using MS Office 2008 and there was a major speed up in the time to launch Word.
Leopard does not support the TRIM command. I found a utility that will issue the TRIM command, but requires at least 10.6 Snow Leopard. Mac OS X 10.6 and later do not support PPC :-( I am going to try the erase free space feature of Disk Utility to simulate TRIM once I start getting performance degradation due to low free blocks available.
So in summary, I had a great experience with upgrading to an SSD in my legacy Powerbook G4. The price was high vs. the equivalent capacity IDE electro-mechanical hard disk drive. There are some performance improvements, but not enough to justify the increased cost considering resale value or the cost of a replacement machine. In perspective, I could have had a brand new 7200 RPM 320 GB hard drive for the same price as the 128GB Transcend SSD.
I plan to use my modified Powerbook for quite a few more years, though. It serves my needs well and is better than stock issue because of the superdrive, memory, and SSD upgrades.
I plan to do incremental backups often. One problem with solid state devices like USB flash drives and SSD is the electronics can totally fail preventing DIY recovery. Pro recovery services are enormously expensive because the flash chips have to be de-soldered then mounted on a rescue board, subsequently the files are then reconstructed, etc. and so on. So keep all flash ROMS devices backed up.
Thanks for reading and contact me with questions about further details.
