SSD for Powermac G3 beige minitower

[Phil168]

Success!

The key was the zip drive. I put together a minimal 8.6 and copied it to a zip disk. I included the Drive Setup utility in the zip. There were a few hiccups along the way. At first the SSD prevented the zip from booting up. So I went and changed the jumper setting to slave and it worked! Very strange. The jumper setting on the old HDD was master. Once I was able to boot up from the zip drive, I was able to reformat the SSD with the Drive Setup and copied the minimal OS 8.6 onto the SSD. Then I selected the SSD as startup disk and restarted and it worked!

The only thing is it's taking a long time for the computer to find the OS and start booting up. I don't recall it taking this long. Maybe I'm used to the Quicksilver booting up quickly. Been a while since I last used the G3.

The OS X on my Quicksilver is 10.2, Jaguar I think. I don't use it much. I prefer 9.2.2. When I partitioned it in OS X, I did HFS extended. I didn't see any option to partition it in Drive Setup so I just left it at 120 gigs. What's so weird is that the SSD worked only when I changed the Addonics adapter to slave. When I had it on master, there was no video, no boot up screen at all.

Thanks so much for all your help!

 

[Dimitris1980]

Has anyone tried this?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/2-Port-SATA-PCI-Controller-Card-Apple-Macintosh-PowerMac-G3-G4-G5-SSD-OSX-OS-9-/254669346388?_trksid=p2349624.m46890.l49292

 

[Dimitris1980]

My computer is a Power Macintosh G3 Minitower (300 mhz, 768mb ram, 120gb hd, Mac OS 8.1 and 9.2.2 installed, Ati Radeon 7000 32mb Mac edition). I use it for retro gaming.

- This card is for sata I speed only?

- What is the maximum speed that I can have with an ssd for this computer?
- Does it have big difference on speed comparatively to ide hd?
- In numbers, what (indicatively) speed may i have?
- Can i boot from the ssd?

- Generally is it worth having an ssd on this computer?

thanks

 

[Michael_b]

Has anyone tried this?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/2-Port-SATA-PCI-Controller-Card-Apple-Macintosh-PowerMac-G3-G4-G5-SSD-OSX-OS-9-/254669346388?_trksid=p2349624.m46890.l49292

that’s just a PC SIL3112 card that has been flashed with Mac firmware... the same card can be had for $10.50 on AliExpress, but you’d need to solder on a different memory chip then flash the Mac firmware.

I think the IDE speeds on this Mac have a theoretical max of 16MB/s. Not sure what you’d be able to get on the PCI bus.

 

[taddy]

I bought the SATA card for Beige G3 on eBay.

However, it could not be used as a boot disk and was returned.

The trouble I encountered was not only the installation failure of OS 8.x and OS 9.x, but also the kernel panic in the installation of OS X 10.2 and 10.4.

 

[Dimitris1980]

I bought the SATA card for Beige G3 on eBay.

However, it could not be used as a boot disk and was returned.

The trouble I encountered was not only the installation failure of OS 8.x and OS 9.x, but also the kernel panic in the installation of OS X 10.2 and 10.4.

You mean that you bought the Sata card from the ebay linked above?

 

[taddy]

That's right. I bought a SATA card from eBay linked above.
A kernel panic occurred during OS X installation.

 

[Dimitris1980]

This is no good. One important thing for me is to be able to boot from the SSD.

 

[Cory5412]

Huh, SIL3112s should be bootable, as far back as system 7.6 (possibly 7.5) on PCI PowerMacs, even pre-G3, so something may have been wrong with that card or the firmware was really a version that's more optimized for OS X.

There are a few 4-port SATA cards for PCI PowerMacs floating around that don't work with OS 9 and/or are only for storage disks, but the 3112 should work for classic/9 and for storage.

In terms of speed: One of these SATA cards should be Good Enough. Even adapting a newer SATA HDD or an SSD to the onboard IDE should be a meaningful improvement, but it'll mostly be in terms of launch times, seeking, and that kind of stuff. It probably won't make anything in-game faster. (like, it won't boost framerates, but it may reduce waits.)

 

[Daniël]

Huh, SIL3112s should be bootable, as far back as system 7.6 (possibly 7.5) on PCI PowerMacs, even pre-G3, so something may have been wrong with that card or the firmware was really a version that's more optimized for OS X.

There are a few 4-port SATA cards for PCI PowerMacs floating around that don't work with OS 9 and/or are only for storage disks, but the 3112 should work for classic/9 and for storage.

Only with the full SeriTek firmware. The "Wiebetech" firmware was a size reduced version of it that fits on the cheapo PC SIL3112 cards' EEPROM, but it only works under OS X.

I wouldn't be surprised if the ROM on the card that's causing KPs is corrupted.

 

[Cory5412]

That'd probably be it! Thank you!

Do you know off hand if the Wiebetech version will fit on the version of this card with the smaller ROM? If so, that might be what happened here, or, it's got the right ROM but it is corrupted.

 

[Daniël]

That'd probably be it! Thank you!

Do you know off hand if the Wiebetech version will fit on the version of this card with the smaller ROM? If so, that might be what happened here, or, it's got the right ROM but it is corrupted.

Yes, the Wiebetech works with the smaller ROM, and shouldn't have an EEPROM check like the SeriTek ROM (the SeriTek ROM checks what manufacturer of EEPROM is used, if it's not on its internal list it will not work). Given Taddy is using OS X 10.2, judging by the Darwin Kernel version reported by the KP log, it should just work, as the Wiebetech ROM works with 10.2 and up. So that's why I suspect something else is wrong with it. These are cheaply manufactured cards after all, a QC slip up wouldn't surprise me.

 

[taddy]

I had a pain with the S-ATA PCI card with SIL3112 chip, so I got an S-ATA PCI card (ACARD AEC-6290M) that works with Beige G3.
The hardware operating environment is Classic Mac OS 8.5, OS 9.x and OS X (10.1 to 10.4).
However, since ACARD AEC-6290M has been discontinued, we have no choice but to look for distribution stock or eBay.