Hilariously, "M5183" represents:
- Power Macintosh G3 (blue-white)
- Power Macintosh G4 (PCI graphics)
- Power Macintosh G4 (AGP Graphics, Sawtooth)
- Power Macintosh G4 (Gigabit Ethernet)
- Power Macintosh G4 (Digital Audio)
I believe /450 was a speed on both the AGP and the Gigabit Ethernet. The Digital Audio moved that up to /466, due to the move to the 133MHz bus.
but they end up being slower than the ATA bus... at least if the system is ATA/100. it's only good if you want to use high-capacity drives...
Huh
It should be faster, is that primarily if you have a lot of other stuff on the bus, or is the whole bus itself slower than ATA/100?
I have a 2TB spinner on SATA in a duallie 1GHz QuickSilver and IME it feels faster than I suspect the machine would have, stock, but I don't have a non-dead stock disk from this era to really compare it against.
EDIT: The only PowerMac G4 with UltraATA/100 is the MDD. I don't remember if the MDD had a /100 and a /133 bus or just a /100 bus.
First-gen SATA is /150 so it's really just a matter of whether or not the bus is poor enough on these that you'll notice a difference.
My guess is that SATA will be a meaningful improvement
regardless because most disks that were stock in this era are bad and mostly couldn't even saturate the IDE bus.
This all of course only matters in OS X, since OS 9 is so bad at i/o.
An SSD should be an experience improvement in both X and 9, regardless of which interface it's connected to.
/EDIT
BTW, can anyone direct me to the correct download image of OS 9.x.x so I can install Classic Mode on this beastie?
For Classic Mode on 10.2/3/4 you can usually use OS9General.DMG, which is a late-era image that is primarily for Classic Mode.
If your system is a ~Sawtooth or Gig-Eth, the next recommendation in terms of "doing it right" is typically to use the retail 9.2.1 image and a 9.2.2 updater, but I've had good luck with the eMac'03 CD image on most of my machines.
All of the M5183s shipped with 9.1 or older so you'll be solid with a 9.2.1 CD.
Here's my own notes so far:
https://doku.stenoweb.net/doku.php?id=macdex:os9-cds to be eventually transcribed into the 68kMLA wiki proper.
Here's my copy of the 9.2.1 retail CD and the eMac CD:
http://vtools.68kmla.org/~/coryw/iso-temp/ (my apologies for the slow upload speed.)
For a machine that boots OS 9, you can honestly leave 9.2.1 in place if you want, the biggest improvements that came with 9.2.2 are to software you should probably run under OS X anyway.
Hit me up if you do use the eMac 9.2.2 CD and end up having trouble (or success) with it, so we can add it to the list.
I think I'll upgrade the RAM to 2GB from the 1GB installed. That should give it some breathing room on OSX Tiger.
Mac OS 9 performs poorly with 1GB or more of memory installed. We had someone in the IRC channel who couldn't get it to install/boot with >1GB installed, although I don't remember how that went when they removed some.
This shouldn't impact Classic Mode, but I would say to back off to 256-896 or so of RAM depending on what sticks you have.
For this reason, my typical recommendation if you can swing it is to use separate systems for OS 9 and OS X. At worst: 10.4 also runs well in ~256-512MB of RAM.