VMSZealot
Well-known member
I thought that this would be so simple. A nice, CF based, SSD for my blue and white G3. It works in my PC - so what could possibly go wrong? CompactFlash is based on IDE after all, and the adaptor is pretty dumb.
Well, firstly, if it’s on the same bus as the hard drive it won’t boot. Master or slave, it doesn’t matter - the Mac won’t start. If I unplug the optical drive and use that bus then it will, after a delay boot.
But now the drive won’t show in Disk Utility when booted with Tiger. System Profiler will see the drive, and correctly identifies it as a SanDisk.
Okay. A different approach is needed. Boot into MacOS 9 and use Disk Utility there. Aha! It sees it. So I try to format it and… damn. It gets about half way through formatting and then dies, and having died wont see the drive at all - or even boot if the half formatted drive is connected.
I have a few CF cards, ranging from 512MB to 32GB. All fail in the same way. Does anyone have any idea as to what might be amiss there? Has anyone succeeded in using a CF card as an SSD in a Mac?
I realise I could use a PCI SATA card in the G3 and just go for a more modern technology - but that won’t work with an old, non-PCI, Performa (which, incidentally, also fails to boot with a CF card present).
Well, firstly, if it’s on the same bus as the hard drive it won’t boot. Master or slave, it doesn’t matter - the Mac won’t start. If I unplug the optical drive and use that bus then it will, after a delay boot.
But now the drive won’t show in Disk Utility when booted with Tiger. System Profiler will see the drive, and correctly identifies it as a SanDisk.
Okay. A different approach is needed. Boot into MacOS 9 and use Disk Utility there. Aha! It sees it. So I try to format it and… damn. It gets about half way through formatting and then dies, and having died wont see the drive at all - or even boot if the half formatted drive is connected.
I have a few CF cards, ranging from 512MB to 32GB. All fail in the same way. Does anyone have any idea as to what might be amiss there? Has anyone succeeded in using a CF card as an SSD in a Mac?
I realise I could use a PCI SATA card in the G3 and just go for a more modern technology - but that won’t work with an old, non-PCI, Performa (which, incidentally, also fails to boot with a CF card present).