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SD to IDE drive replacement for PDQ PowerBook G3

KeithTilton

Active member
I happened to get quite a few 128gb MicroSD cards for very cheap and my PDQ PowerBook’s hard drive was on it’s way out. Since the G3 PowerBooks have a 128gb maximum drive capacity I thought one of those cards would be perfect to use as a hard drive replacement.

You need a 44-pin IDE to SD card adapter.
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Many of them will say that their maximum supported size is 32gb however this is NOT the case. I don’t know the actual maximum size that will work, but after setting everything up correctly, this will absolutely work with a 128gb Samsung MicroSD card (in an MicroSD to SD adapter).

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I had formatted my card as FAT32 initially through Mac OS Monterey and installed it into my PowerBook. In Mac OS 9’s Disk Setup program, it showed as a 87gb drive. I originally thought that there was some kind of issue where the adapter wasn’t recognizing the full size. Initializing the drive kept failing no matter how I tried partitioning it. Formatting the drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) allowed me to see the full 128gb, but initializing the drive still failed.

In order to initialize the drive, you will need an older version of Mac OS X. I’m going to guess that it will need to be older than whenever Apple revamped Disk Utility (Yosemite?) as on High Sierra it would not let me partition the SD card no matter what adapter I used.
However, once I switched to Snow Leopard it let me partition it without issue.

Partition the SD card as a singular Mac OS Extended (Journaled) drive and set the partition scheme to Apple Partition Map.

Mac OS 9 will let you install on this partition, however, it’ll give you an error saying that a 3rd party utility formatted this drive so the Mac OS 9 drivers can’t be installed. The installer will say Mac OS successfully installed, but when you restart, it won't boot off the drive.

Thus, make sure you open up Disk Setup and Initialize the drive before installing. It should successfully Initialize this time (or in my case, for the first time all night). The drive will now be prepared for you to install Mac OS 9 as normal.

So far I haven't encountered any issues with having a single 128gb partition or anything. It's not remarkably faster, since we're limited by ATA-2 speeds, but it is a little eerie using a machine of this age and it makes virtually no noise at all.

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I hope this can help someone out. I’ve never struggled in the past with lower sized spinning rust that was previously partitioned as FAT32/MBR and installing classic Mac OS. I have honestly never seen Disk Setup not initialize a drive except for on one that's failing. It always seems like these flash to IDE adapters always require you to set up the flash storage in just the right way.
 

Byrd

Well-known member
Thanks for posting also - I've been eyeing off these adapters (they're all the same, everywhere), CF cards are too expensive now. Would you mind posting a benchmark when fully functional - eg. Norton System Info - be good to see where these are of merit vs. being too slow for later model Macs.

JB
 

KeithTilton

Active member
Thanks for posting also - I've been eyeing off these adapters (they're all the same, everywhere), CF cards are too expensive now. Would you mind posting a benchmark when fully functional - eg. Norton System Info - be good to see where these are of merit vs. being too slow for later model Macs.

JB

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I will have to dig up a working IDE drive (I think I might still have my Clamshell's stock drive somewhere) but it seems like it made quite a difference.
 

KeithTilton

Active member
Pulled out a period accurate drive and it booted just fine. Looks almost exactly like the one I took out of this Powerbook but this one actually boots with an install.
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Anyway, tested it with System Info and here's the results.
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The SD card appears to be 3 times faster!
 

Franklinstein

Well-known member
Thanks for posting also - I've been eyeing off these adapters (they're all the same, everywhere), CF cards are too expensive now. Would you mind posting a benchmark when fully functional - eg. Norton System Info - be good to see where these are of merit vs. being too slow for later model Macs.

JB

It used to be that the main reason to go CF is that it was a direct ATA interface; no expensive chip required. They were usually higher capacity than most SD cards up until ~2010 or so. Also, do CF cards do any sort of wear leveling or other management functions? If so, I'd probably prefer them over SD, especially if you're using VM (selectable in OS 9 but not under OS X which also likes writing to its various log files) or other heavy r/w applications. If not, yeah SD is probably a better idea anymore especially since the bridge chips are so much better now.
 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
Thank you for this write-up! This is a great confirmation of something I've suspected for a while: SD cards in these IDE adapters are going to end up being perfectly fine replacements longer-term for hard disks in G3/G4-era Macs, especially ones that run OS 9.

I don't think most CF and IDE cards do wear leveling but you may find that some high end industrial oriented ones do. On an OS 9 system, you can just "have enough RAM" and VM won't really get touched, so you don't need to turn off VM for it not to be a big impact to storage. Under OS X, using a "real SSD" using an m.2 SATA adapter may be a better overall strategy, so you can avoid needing to swap out the storage device if it dies.

That said: good/midrange modern SD cards will probably still be "fine" under OS X/PPC, provided you have a backup or don't have critical information on the boot volume. Especially for desktops that are easier to pull apart.

For anything with SATA you'd want to just use a SATA disk, and for anything difficult to pull apart, using a SATA SSD will result in a longer lasting setup as well, especially for OS X. (The main reason, pre-SATA, to use flash is mostly due to space and due to older IDE controllers doing poorly with >137-gig disks. In SATA-era Macs, fresh hard disks are also a solid option, OS X on these tends to be "fine" on hard disks, and you can get more capacity, usually for cheaper, but what you choose will probably depend more on what you need than what the system can technically do.)

One of these days I'll pick up a couple CF/IDE and SD/IDE adapters and test them in a few systems. I've got several G3-era Quantum disks that have kicked it.
 

3lectr1cPPC

Well-known member
Thanks for the writeup on this! I'll keep this in mind when I eventually get around to putting SSDs in my old PowerBooks. I'd probably go with an mSata adapter in my PDQ for speed under OS X, but I really need an SD adapter for my 1400c. The original drive was a slow and cranky 1GB IBM, and the 10GB Toshiba, while faster, shows to be failing in drive health tools so it's probably not going to last much longer.
I never cease to be impressed on how if a computer exists, someone has found a way to get solid state storage in it. Imagine what we would do if SCSI-2-SD adapters never existed!
 

Byrd

Well-known member
Thanks for posting the benchmarks! It looks like performance will be on par with a fast mechanical HD.

It used to be that the main reason to go CF is that it was a direct ATA interface; no expensive chip required. They were usually higher capacity than most SD cards up until ~2010 or so. Also, do CF cards do any sort of wear leveling or other management functions? If so, I'd probably prefer them over SD, especially if you're using VM (selectable in OS 9 but not under OS X which also likes writing to its various log files) or other heavy r/w applications. If not, yeah SD is probably a better idea anymore especially since the bridge chips are so much better now.

That's that I always thought too, and I've bought many second hand CF cards of decent capacity to convert some of my Mac drives to "solid state" but have hit a few walls with some adapters and Macs (TAM, Q630, PPC 9600, PowerBook 150) - all had issues, but other Macs of mine are fine. I don't think CF cards do any wear levelling at all but they were usually higher in quality and specification than cheap SD cards so were a better choice for some years.

I doubt any of us are using our Macs for critical data so I'd be happy to try these adapters now, if the SD card fails nobody cares and can be replaced walking down to the supermarket - opposed to CF cards which aren't stocked anywhere apart from online.
 

LaPorta

Well-known member
As far as the card wear issue: the same old addage as always applies - save early and often, and back up constantly. Once I get a machine with an SD card or anything set up, I image it and save that to my RAID drive. Anything I create that is important, I copy off. This way, if the card fails, I can spend $10, get a new one, image it, and it's all good. The cards are so cheap, it doesn't even pay to worry about then faililng.
 

KeithTilton

Active member
Alright I decided to replace the stock 1gb drive in my PowerBook 1400c with an SD card and can confirm it works great on Mac OS 8.5/8.6.

So as far as I can tell, it should work in every IDE PowerBook. The 1400's IDE/ATA interface is pretty primitive so I can only assume it'll work in all of them. The only PowerBook earlier than the 1400c with an IDE interface is the Duo 2300c and I definitely don't have access to one of those.

Curiously, it shows up as an SD to CF Adapter in Apple System Profiler.
 

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3lectr1cPPC

Well-known member
The 5300 and 190 series PowerBooks also have IDE, I would assume it works in those as well. The only one I would imagine having trouble with is the PowerBook 150. It was the first with IDE, and it's extremely picky about what drives it will accept.
 

LaPorta

Well-known member
I can verify that my adapter has worked in my 1400 for months now. It is partitioned, and has 7.5.5, 8.1, and 8.6 on different partitions and it works with all of them. Not one problem at all.
 

LaPorta

Well-known member
I have a 2300c I want to restore...but it needs a new screen. It is cracked. If I ever get that going, I will try an adapter in there.
 

CircuitBored

Well-known member
Great post! I've been using one of these adapters in my 1400 (formerly a cs, now a c) for about a year and have had no trouble. I've found these adapters to be compatible with every IDE laptop I've thrown them in. My Toshiba Libretto is also home to one of these adapters, no trouble at all.
 

AlpineRaven

Well-known member
Evening all!

PowerBook G3 PDQ (300mhz CPU but overclocked to 333mhz and also I do have BlueLogix 466mhz as well)

For last couple of weeks I have been playing with;

IDE to SD Adapter (same as 1st post)
IDE to mSATA adapter
IDE to m.2 adapter

I am still suspicious about the reliability of IDE to SD card - I may have been getting corruption issues - I am not quite sure as I haven't experienced enough time with it. (has anyone noticed that?)

So far IDE to mSATA and m.2 both are working very well - seems no issues have occurred. (apart from freezing when opening up start up disk control panel in 9.2.2, but 9.1 or 8.6 doesn't seem to have that issue, only 9.2.2.

One very interesting thing, you cannot install OSX onto either those above as the installer will either get hanged up - it JUST won't install OSX. - Doesn't matter if it's 10.0 or 10.1 or 10.2, I have a feeling OSX likes proper ATA interface not PowerBook G3 PDQ's interface. Its not the CPU at fault as I changed it over to 266mhz and 300mhz CPU to eliminate it)

So, I thought I'd go to PowerBook G3 Lombard - with those HDDs in it hoping to get it installed from faster CD and DVD drive (even DVD disk)- Lombard did the same thing.. Recently I was talking to someone and I had a light bulb moment, PowerBook G3 Pismo - it already had experienced with IDE to SD and IDE to mSATA and m.2, it currently has mSATA in it with OSX no issues, so I decided to install OSX 10.2 Jaguar onto IDE to m.2 in Pismo, then take it out and put it in PDQ - viola problem solved which was the only workaround to do that.

SO far stability is good, I will run some benchmarking over 4 HDDs, real IDE, IDE to SD, IDE to m.2 and IDE to mSATA to see how it performs.

As per photo - showing IDE to SD, IDE to mSATA and m.2/mSATA cards, not all m.2 works in IDE to m.2 adapters (and 466mhz CPU!)
Cheers
AP
 

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AlpineRaven

Well-known member
Had time this afternoon to play with my PowerBook G3 PDQ with Hard drives.

I had;
IDE to SD
IDE to mSATA
IDE to m.2

Run some tests - clearly m.2 is the fastest - see highlighted.
Specs;
PowerBook G3 PDQ with 512gb RAM, Running Mac OS 8.6, mirror image between 3 SSDs.

CPU:
Apple 300mhz overclocked to 333mhz CPU with 512mb RAM
and also
PowerLogix BlueChip 466mhz with 512mb RAM.

Clearly mSATA was the slowest so I didn't bother mucking around with it.

So, due its stability so far as we speak, I have decided to use m.2 and PowerLogix 466mhz CPU.

Merry Christmas
Cheers
AP
 

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AlpineRaven

Well-known member
The m.2 adapter is the green board in this photo. (44pin to m.2)
Black one is mSATA
Bottom on is IDE to SD.

CPU card on the right - PowerLogix 466mhz.

Cheers
AP
 

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