IDE to SD adapter in a Pismo?

[rsolberg]

That's a physical limitation. The ATA/IDE controller is limited to 28-bit integers/addressing. This means only the first ≤128GiB are accessible. 128GiB was far, far beyond what was available on a single drive in 1994 when 28-bit LBA came to be part of ATA. 48-bit LBA was standardised with ATA-6 in 2003, though there are some examples of it in 2002 hardware. It can address up to 128PiB.

Note: this is not a specific Mac issue, but a limitation of the LBA used in virtually all of the ATA controllers of the era.

 

[asaggynoodle]

Very interesting, thank you for posting that. 

Suppose you're right, out of the mountains of hard disks I've got, all of them from ~1998 (Earliest one's that work still) are much smaller than I remember.

I guess I've forgotten the fine details over the while as my Western Digital Caviar 34000 is labeled in 4000.7MB, not 4GB.

My goodness how time fly's.

 

[Cory5412]

Do we have a list of exactly which Macs have controllers that are not prone to the LBA48 limitation?

It's worth noting that that limitation only applies to IDE disks, so if you put a SCSI controller in whatever desktop Mac, you can still use 136 gig disks therein. 

As another thought: CF/SD card media aren't built to the same standards that "solid state disks" are -- so if you're looking for something on which to run OS X, it would be better to go in the direction of the m.2/msata adapter, or a regular SSD built with a PATA interface. It will cost more, but it will last a lot more.

Another possibility in some desktop or mostly-stationary Macs will be to use, say, an external disk with a Firewire/SATA bridge board. These should boot old Macs and be faster than USB 1.1, and you can put modern SSDs in. I've considered doing this with my TiBook, although it's almost not worth it, since I only really want to boot OS 9, and that system will boot OS 9 via USB. (Actually, it could be interesting to try both and see what the real usability difference is.)

 

[rsolberg]

Officially, it's the G4 MDD, Power Mac G5, and XServe plus "any (other) model introduced after June 2002", but there seem to be some models released earlier that support the larger drives. The QS 2002 was introduced in January 2002, and many, if not all examples support LBA-48.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT2544#bootrom

http://lowendmac.com/2005/how-big-hard-drive-imac-emac-power-mac-powerbook-ibook/

Edit: Cory- I've made a similar experiment using a 7200rpm 3.5" SATA drive in a USB/FW enclosure booting Mac OS 9.2.2. I found that booted from USB 1.1, the cursor would freeze regularly for about a second. It didn't happen with FireWire, and bootup, disk I/O were tangibly faster.

 

[danikayser84]

In my Pismo I'm currently using a 32GB Transcend SSD (with a dual boot of OS 9.2.2 and Tiger), haven't had any issues but 9.2.2 does indeed boot pretty fast on it

May consider a small SSD (in the 2GB to 8GB range) if the 3.2GB drive in my 1400cs dies, although I read here that some older PowerBooks don't like the Swissbit ones (readily available on eBay/etc.)

 

[FacnyFreddy]

I recently swapped the againg 40GB 5400 rpm drive (IBM?) with a Toshiba mSATA drive and a JC20330 based adapter. I tried the CF mod for a while, but, it failed ... I started getting errors in Tiger when running photoshop and eventuallly it would not boot.

CF cards don't have the longevity that I thought they would. At least the Transend unit (x266 32GB) didn't

 

[Cory5412]

CF and SD aren't aren't really meant for the workload of running a computer. Especially Mac OS X. You could get away with one on OS 9 if you could guarantee you had enough RAM that it would not hit virtual RAM, but it would still not be particularly ideal. You could (but shouldn't) turn off virtual memory, instead I'd just minimize the amount and make sure you have 512m-1g of ram in your Pismo.

Memory cards like this are really meant for fill-then-read-then-delete kinds of operation, or to be filled infrequently and read from a lot.

Using a real SSD is definitely the way to go on any G3 or newer where OS X is even remotely a possibility. If you were running Tiger and also Photoshop, that was going to be hitting the disk extremely hard.

 

[bunnspecial]

I have advocated the mSATA route for a while for a variety of "unusual" applications. I have a trio of last generation Powerbooks(12" early '05, 15" and 17" DLSDs) running 128gb mSATA drives and they are impressive. At least on the DLSDs, the drives will saturate the bus save for about a 5mb/s overhead loss in the adapter, and the machines honestly don't feel that slow unless I start bogging them down on the internet.

I came into a stash of 60gb 7200rpm drives a while back, and I've used those in several other laptops. Since laptop ATA drives don't exactly go on trees these days I tend to save them for computers I actually use and then use the pulls from those computers in other instances when I need a drive. At the moment, I have these drives deployed in my 1ghz TiBook that I use frequently, a Pismo, and a G4-upgraded Lombard that I'm trying desperately to get Leopard running on(long story). The 867ghz Ti my dad uses to play CivII also has a 100gb 7200rpm that was pulled from my 15" DLSD.

If you browse Ebay, you'll see a lot of Kingspec branded 2.5" ATA SSDs. I've not owned one in that form factor. I did, however, buy one a few months back to install in my first-gen MacBook Air. These computers use a 1.8" ZIF ATA drive, something probably more commonly known as an iPod drive. I had a nice 256gb Samsung mSATA drive for the computer, but none of the adapters I bought would properly engage the ZIF cable. I finally bit the bullet and bought a 128gb Kingspec, which was not inexpensive considering the size. It fit perfectly, but the performance is pretty underwhelming. Sequential read and write top out in the neighborhood of 50mb/s, which I think is about half what the bus is capable of.

 

[FacnyFreddy]

Luckily, it was only a test to see if I could get it done. the CF was already in an ipod that took a bad spill and I had it laying around. The adapter was only $3.... so live and learn.

I caution folks who are going to really use this for any workload. Even the SD adapters have their limitations. But it is a cheap(er) and easy way to get up and running. But with mSATA prices as low as they are and Marvell adapters on the market again, I wouldn't spend too much time on the lower end of the spectrum for a rebuild.

Memory cards like this are really meant for fill-then-read-then-delete kinds of operation, or to be filled infrequently and read from a lot.

Using a real SSD is definitely the way to go on any G3 or newer where OS X is even remotely a possibility.