and my Lombards and Sawteeth are on 9.2.2. Is it really significantly heavier than, say, 8.6?
IME, no. That said, I tend (as mentioned above) to favor 8.1 on anything not a fast 604/e/ev or G3. It works for me since I'm usually running 7-era or 7-friendly software anyway. The 9-era software I like and want all tends to require a G3 in particular (Dreamweaver MX for example) so I just... run that under 9.2.2 on my G3s, which are fast enough to absorb any performance penalties 9.2.2 might impose over, say, 8.6.
I would largely argue that most of the reasons to run 8.5 or 8.6 are:
- You have personal nostalgia for it, specifically
- You have a technical requirement for some app that runs on 8.6 but not 9.1 and you have a machine fast enough to justify 8.6 over 8.1.
By way of benchmarks, I discovered this:
Classic Mac OS Benchmarks and Comparisons - System 7 Today which has probably been online since like 2005 or so when S7T first launched, but it was interesting. These things aren't particularly
great "benchmarks" but they are good indicators.
One of these days I'll see if I can do the MacBench 4 tests which I was recollecting above on something like my 8600/300, which is fast enough that even if 9.1 is absorbing some of the potential application performance, it's not noticeable or meaningfully bad in day-to-day use.
I'll also get my numbers for the 6100 and 6200 out and see about writing those down somewhere I can get to them so I can remembe rthem more easily. I might make a "which OS version?" page on my personal wiki.
Disk drivers: I found it not an issue when running newer disk drivers with old Mac System versions. I mostly used the disk setup utilities of System 8.5-9.0.4 also even for 68k Macs running System 7.6.1.
That's actually a great point,
@LaPorta - I'm sorry if I missed this, how did you end up prepping the volume on the SCSI2SD? (Or do you even have one installed yet?)
I used LaCie Silverlining, a version from 1998 or 1999, on my scsi2sd v6 in the 8600, I didn't even bother setting the properties to try to pretend to be an Apple-approved disk, I just left the device name as default and Silverlining worked great. I did have to boot off of another device (CD would work), then get access to the Silverlining app (I put it on a Zip disk but putting it on an AppleShare server would be fine) and then run the installation. I think the 9.1 media did a further update on the driver, but I'm not 100% on that part.