Powerbook G4 Not Reading Hard Drive New
A while back I bought an Apple PowerBook G4. A late-2005 high-resolution 1.67ghz 17" PowerBook G4, the final PowerBook earlier Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel. In its day it was a mutha; nowadays its performance is leisurely and very little software is all the same maintained for it, although in its favour the example still looks awesome. The 1680x1050 screen is well-nigh merely not quite Hd.
I employ it mostly every bit a giant iPod - I've downloaded a tonne of podcasts - but with TenFourFox it can withal surf the internet. Argue rages as to whether it's best to install OS X 10.4.11 Tiger or 10.5.8 Leopard on older Macintoshes. Tiger is patently slightly faster than Leopard, but having tried Leopard I didn't notice much departure. Feature-wise Leopard wasn't a great leap over Tiger, although equally you will discover after in this post the Fourth dimension Machine backup utility was very useful.
No amount of tinkering will make a fifteen-yr-former G4 run apace, only in that location are a few means to speed it up. The easiest is retentivity. All of the aluminium-bodied PowerBooks have a pair of PC2-4200 DDRs. OS 10 enjoys lots of memory only sadly the G4 motherboard simply accepts a maximum of 2gb of retentivity (1.25gb in the early 12" models), which was a flake stingy fifty-fifty in 2005.
The other big upgrade is a new hard drive. The 1.67ghz PowerBook G4 originally came with a 120gb 5400rpm hard drive, which was very expert for 2005 both in terms of capacity and speed. Unfortunately G4 PowerBooks used the Parallel ATA IDE interface, which is a problem because PATA drives were discontinued several years ago.
In theory the near fuss-free way to upgrade the hard drive would be to fit a 7200rpm PATA Hitachi TravelStar or similar, simply they're merely bachelor used, and I'k wary of buying a used laptop hard drive. How hard was it used?
There are other options. A Compact Wink card with an IDE adapter seems like a waste product of a skilful Compact Flash card. There are a couple of PATA solid country drives on the market, but the reviews aren't smashing. Amongst the PowerBook cognoscenti the most popular choice is to use a lilliputian tiny Micro-SATA SSD mounted in an MSATA-IDE adapter, viz:
A 128gb Toshiba MSATA drive (lesser) beneath an MSATA-PATA adapter (top). You have to screw the MSATA drive into the adapter otherwise it sticks out at an angle. What kind of QC did the adapter pass? Who knows.
Some laptops have MSATA cards naturally. Modern Lenovo ThinkPads oftentimes have an MSATA slot for an SSD boot bulldoze in addition to a 2.5" drive bay. Simply the PowerBook G4 predates MSATA so you have to utilize an adapter.
What is MSATA? It'southward a type of tiny SSD that uses the SATA standard, but information technology's tiny. Yous tin also buy 2.v" SATA-MSATA adapters if you want to put an MSATA drive into a modern laptop.
The SSD in its cradle. One day I will think that Philippines has ane 50 and two PPs. I day.
The adapters are available from Cathay via eBay. They cost nigh £three. Just search for "MSATA PATA". We live in a world where people in Mainland china tin can ship little electrical trinkets half-way beyond the world and still brand a profit from £3. Somewhere out in the ocean there's a container ship ploughing through the waves, with a container filled with little electrical trinkets from China. I like to think about that when I go to sleep at night. A container ship driving through a crude sea. Someone has just brought the captain a mug of java. The wipers are trying to keep the span windows clear of spray. The weather radar shows ameliorate weather ahead.
Ordinarily when I replace a laptop'due south hard drive with a newer model, I clone the original to the replacement and then bandy them effectually. That's not possible with IDE, because there's no way to power the replacement drive outside the estimator. I have a special ready of cables that can ability SATA drives and connect them via USB to a laptop, but ii.5" IDE drives don't support external ability:
This is all well and skilful, but it doesn't power the MSATA drive. USB doesn't deliver enough ability and there'south no separate ability header.
There are a couple of ways effectually this. If you've just bought a PowerBook G4 and y'all don't care about retaining whatsoever of the data, or if the seller reinitialised OSX, or indeed if information technology doesn't have a hard bulldoze at all, yous can simply put the MSATA bulldoze into the G4 and install OS X from scratch. Annotation that the brand-new MSATA drive volition be unformatted, so you have to pop open Disk Utility and format it as e.g. Mac Bone Extended (journaled) before OS X's installation routine will recognise it.
To dismantle the auto I followed these instructions from iFixIt, although at that place's nix conceptually hard nearly taking the G4 apart. You need a T8 Torx screwdriver head as well as a standard Philips head.
The G4'south interior is as fascinating equally its exterior. The orange-and-grey colour scheme is very attractive. This is the trackpad cable.
The edge of the keyboard. Annotation that the lid of the laptop'due south base comes direct off, and also note that the final 1.67ghz models had a slightly different keyboard than before models - the backlight was modified - with a slightly different part number.
The original 100gb Ultra ATA/100 hard drive, at present fifteen years sometime. Information technology'southward noisy but yet works. I'm going to put information technology in a desk drawer as a fill-in.
The interior, with a large hole where the battery goes. This is a good opportunity to accident dust out of the fans.
The MSATA SSD is much smaller than the PATA drive. Accept you lot ever heard about Kure Kure Takora? Information technology was a Japanese children's testify from the early 1970s nearly a greedy octopus and his pals. The characters were played by actors dressed in large costumes, a la the Teletubbies.
What makes Kure Kure Takora hilarious is the relentless ultraviolence. It'south similar Cannibal Holocaust merely much less restrained.
Kure Takora and his pals suffer horrible injuries in almost every episode merely remain upbeat.
In this clip his friends persuade him to commit seppuku(!), and he almost goes alee with it(!!), complete with close-ups of the clearly terrified championship character holding a katana to his belly(!!!). Meanwhile kids in the United kingdom had The Clangers, which wasn't the same.
As you tin run into the MSATA SSD looks sad and solitary in the difficult drive bay. I eventually lined the lesser of the bay with a couple of strips of masking tape so that the SSD wasn't resting on bare metallic. A couple of pads of heat-resistant foam might help keep information technology in place.
There'due south a hazard the SSD might bounciness around within the case and loosen the hard bulldoze cable - or the sound carte cablevision, which runs over the top of the drive bay, but I doubtable you'd take to actually bash the PowerBook before that happened.
I didn't want to lose my data and reinstall everything from scratch. It takes time to track downwards one-time PowerPC applications. So I used Time Machine to back upward all my settings to an external bulldoze. I and then installed the MSATA bulldoze, installed OS X (from a USB stick, using this handy guide), updated Bone X until in that location were no more than updates, and and so used Os X's Migration Assistant to transfer my settings and applications from the external drive to the MSATA SSD. I suggest you budget at least 2 afternoons to practice all of this formatting and information transfer.
Ordinarily I'm wary of using an operating organization's congenital-in backup and data migration tools, perhaps because I grew upwardly with Windows. I'm a Norton Ghost and latterly Macrium Reverberate man. Simply Os X'due south combination of Time Motorcar and Migration Banana worked flawlessly.
Or at least near flawlessly. For some reason Quicktime wasn't transferred, so I had to update Quicktime to the latest version for OS Ten ten.5.8 before I could utilize iTunes. Also my installation of CS2 lost its licence data (I assume it recognises that the difficult drive is unlike, and contacts Adobe via the internet for guidance), but CS2 is at present available from Adobe basically for costless, and then I just downloaded some other re-create.
In this episode Kure Kure Takora tries to steal a volume from a lizard, who fights back, so he challenges the cadger to a samurai duel - and kills him! Kills him stone expressionless. It turns out the book was a cookbook; the lizard was planning to pour salt over Kure Takora and so cut him into chunks and eat him.
I've never liked the default OS Ten x.5 wallpaper. The ten.4 wallpaper was less dramatic but more tasteful; Leopard's wallpaper is surprisingly tacky for Apple. Begone!
All done. Compare this prototype with the PowerBook at the tiptop of the article, which had the original hard drive.
Does the rigmarole of installing an SSD in a fifteen-yr-old laptop make rational sense? My Toshiba MSATA SSD was designed to pump data at 500mb/s through a 6gb/s SATA Three bus, simply the Ultra ATA/100 interface in the G4 can simply cope with 100mb/due south, so iv-fifths of the SSD's performance is wasted. XBench'due south figures for sequential block writes are no better than a good 7200rpm physical hard drive:
However the random write speed is much faster than a physical hard bulldoze. Random write speeds measure a storage medium's seek fourth dimension, which is where SSDs excel, because they don't have to motility a caput over a disc to choice upwards data. SSDs in general are faster at writing larger blocks of data than smaller blocks, and the figures above reverberate this; SSDs are slowest when writing lots of tiny files.
I really should have measured the speed of the physical hard bulldoze for the sake of comparison. I should have thought of that. Am I going to dismantle the G4, put back the concrete hard drive, and exam information technology? No.
Subjectively the G4 doesn't feel as if it's booting faster, although it is noticeably quieter. Applications launch quicker, merely TenFourFox is limited more by the CPU and RAM than by hard drive access, which is unfortunate because TenFourFox is the application I employ about. MSATA-PATA adapters apparently produce more heat than a physical drive, but the G4's fan seems to come on less; whether it'south because I've blown out the grit, or because there's a lot more space inside the case for air to broadcast, I know non. I have read that this upgrade interferes with the fan direction of the 12" PowerBook G4, which has much less interior space.
A few years agone this kind of upgrade would have been economically iffy for what is essentially a novelty toy. In that location comes a point when the money spent on upgrading a auto would be better off put towards the toll of a replacement. However MSATA SSDs have come downwardly in price and are now widely available on the used market, so for what amounted to £thirty and an afternoon fiddling with a screwdriver I feel it was worth information technology. Just don't await the kind of lighting improvements you get from replacing a physical hard drive with a SATA Ii or 3 SSD. Oh no.
Source: http://women-and-dreams.blogspot.com/2018/09/upgrading-powerbook-g4-with-ssd.html
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