OS X Disk Utility (OS9 Drivers option) Boot 8.6?

[butterburger]

Define Wear Leveling Support? It is practically an absolute must for BLC/MLC NAND drive. Even SLC CompactFlash cards have some spare area since at least 1998 or somewhen like that. If you mean host-assisted wear levelling, then, no: I am pretty confident in my assumption, classic Mac OS and Mac OS X, even today's latest version, do not utilise CompactFlash Association feature set (CFA feature set).

 

[CC_333]

Hmm, like I said, my understanding is limited, so I can't define "wear leveling" very well. My apologies.

c

 

[rezwits]

Yeah, mine isn't that great either, other than the understanding that each feature is a rebranding of the other, in a sense per what kind of device.  Meaning the CF card doesn't have built in TRIM, it has wear leveling.  But you know, come to think of it, I bet you the wear leveling is built in the CF mechanism itself and is not OS or interface dependent.  So, it probably could work, in theory.  Meaning everything that gets written goes thru the CFs wear leveling process in order to be written.

More research, but god I get sick of googling.  There needs to be a better search engine.

 

[rezwits]

Wow ok what a day.  So in frustration, I didn't get my dual power cable that I ordered, that will be here Monday, cause I had to slap the guy on the back of the head and say "Hey did you ship this yet?"  Five minutes later he's like "Shipped - Tracking #".

But I did have one Floppy Connecter - Molex, so I could do one drive at a time.

Long story short I was an ABSOLUTE IDIOT.  Guess what I did?  I said oh, "Format Options -> Low Level Format, oh and Zero Data"  why I have no idea!

So crashing rebooting messing with the adapter and the card etc, I was like enough.  So good thing I ordered two sets, I took out the adapter and put in the other CF card and adapter in the other port.  Booted up went to Drive Setup, went straight to just, click initialize click initialize, and boom right there on the Desktop it was "untitled" (over thinking idiot today)

DON'T LOW LEVEL!, DON'T ZERO DATA!

But I looked at the other adapter I took out, and low and behold, the JP1 on the left side facing me got bent from opening and closing the lid and power cable, so I gotta order another one tonight for the other side.  But holy smokes is that thing fast, at least it feels fast.  I went to disk copy and created a 2GB blank image and zeroed the data, and it came out to exactly 13.333 MB/s (capital B) , I went to the finder and did a Duplicate and it came out to exactly 11.111 MB/s (capital B) .

I'll report back drive to drive like on Wednesday or Thursday, when I get my replacement adapter and the dual power cable.

10.2 installer also saw the drive. btw  Is that fast tho? 

Here's the wiki page section for ATA:

--==--

The ATA/ATAPI-4 standard also introduced several "Ultra DMA" transfer modes. These initially supported speeds from 16 MByte/s to 33 MByte/second. In later versions, faster Ultra DMA modes were added, requiring new 80-wire cables to reduce crosstalk. The latest versions of Parallel ATA support up to 133 MByte/s.

--==--

So, I am thinking I am getting the 16 MB/s, which kinda sucks, maybe I should get the ACARD  damn!

I just remember back in the day on the G3 with a regular hard drive, my speed spec top was 9MB/s.

Laters...

oh btw, if you look at this bottom chart,

https://eshop.macsales.com/Reviews/Framework.cfm?page=/Benchmarks/beigeatatest/bootanddupe.html

I am coming in at 18.75 seconds:  (file Duplication), so twice as fast as what OWC reported back in the day, kinda cause mine was just one file.  But  Ok, I am good   actually CORRECTION, with 3,500 (plus a 1,000) files in a folder, at 250MB it took 90 SECONDS. eek.  Thats kinda bad.  Those were actually 133MHz hard drives attached, but I am on a 266MHz machine, and not a 350MHz machine, and those drives were of the 120GB variety and not a 64GB CF.  it's pretty relative, but I am a little slow.  Sucks.  But it feels really fast, so... idk

I'll read some other posts to see if I can get some speed reports!!!

 

[Elfen]

You could probably restore the other CF with a CF to USB Adapter (or multi-card to usb adapter that includes CF).

I'm not advertising WalMart but they got a few models for under $10. Here's one:

http://www.walmart.com/ip/Iogear-12-in-1-USB-Pocket-Card-Reader-and-Writer/10299066

Put the CF in, under OSX use Disk Utility, partition the CF as you need it in Mac OS (not OSX), format the CF Partitions (with Zero Out Data), and you should be able to put it in the IDE adapter and use the card from there.

Question - where is the pin bent? In the IDE PCI Card or the CF to IDE adapter?

 

[rezwits]

JP1 The jumper and the pins its on.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Compact-Flash-CF-to-3-5-Female-40-Pin-IDE-Bootable-Adapter-Converter-Card-/291600987642?hash=item43e4c5f5fa:g:~7gAAOSwgQ9VrbWO

JP1 when I wiggled the card out the jumper just bent 70° cause it hit the actual ATA Card.  Maybe it works maybe it doesn't but at $6 an adapter and with my power cord situation, I just got another shipped out.

Thanks for all the help man.

 

[Elfen]

Oh, the Master/Slave Switch. You should be able to bend that (carefully) to 90 degrees and put the jumper back on it or cross Pins 1 & 2 together until they touch and short to set it to Master. It should be fine.
 
I thought one of the tiny pins that goes into the CF or the pins in the IDE Card got bent. You can straighten those out carefully with a pair of tweezers or Jeweler's Needle Nose Pliers. But you need to do it slowly are carefully or you will break the pin.

 

[rezwits]

I sent you a PM btw for a price to MOD

 

[Elfen]

I replied as it might not be needed as you are reaching the limits of you machine as I did mine. LOL! Like I said, I have the same adapters, so I need to check them first when I get the time.

 

[Cory5412]

Is this on the built in ATA bus or with a card? For some reason I was under the impression you were trying to get an ATA/133 card, if so:

For reference, ATA maximum speed is 133 megabytes (capital M, capital B) per second. (Compare to SATA where for SATA 3 and 6 (generations 2 and 3) transfer speeds are actually given in gigabits (lowercase B.) Even if it were ATA 133 megabits per second (it's not, I checked) top theoretical speed should be like 16 megabytes per second.

So, 13 megabytes per second isn't really very fast.

What this is a limitation, I can't say, especially since I'm pretty sure big modern CF cards should be able to go faster than that.

If that's what you're getting off the RAID card, it's probably not gong to speed up appreciably if you RAID devices on it, and if you're really looking for performance: get a SATA card.

wear leveling on an SSD should be built into the firmware of the drive. TRIM isn't a wear leveling function, but it *can* help performance, and you need *really* new operating systems to do it. No version of OS X that can run on a PPC Mac will do it, I'd have to go check to see if it was ever added to 10.6, it came into the common vernacular a little after that if I remember correctly.

TRIM isn't really that important, but wear leveling, as you can guess, basically means that instead of always writing data to the one same spot at the beginning of the physical disk, the disk moves the write to a different part of the media and records internally where that information went. It's one of the reasons that seek speeds on SSDs are so important. I'm sure different SSDs do this in different ways, and to be honest I've never seen it talked about as something the OS should or can manage, or that has any bearing on situations such as, say, RAIDing volumes.

However, it should be noted that SATA SSDS are MUCH more "complete" as products than CF cards.

CF cards aren't really meant to run complete computing environments off of. They're really meant to fill up, in order, clear out, and then fill up again, so "wear leveling" tends to happen just by the natural way that people use their cameras and other capture devices.

So, ultimately, I recommend that you get a real SSD and either one of those IDE to mSATA adapters, or a PCI SATA card.

 

[Bunsen]

You can straighten [pins] out carefully with a pair of tweezers or Jeweler's Needle Nose Pliers. But you need to do it slowly are carefully or you will break the pin.

Haven't tried this myself, but I'm told a mechanical pencil does a great job too.  ie, remove the lead and use the grippy retracting end of the pencil to grab the pin and bend it back to vertical.

 

[Elfen]

Bunsen, that sounds like a great idea.