Well, the original 80GB hard drive in my old 12" PowerBook was going south (irreparable errors reported in disk utility, etc.), so I decided to install an OWC pata SSD. I went for the 120GB Mercury Legacy SSD, which arrived last week. It was a tad expensive at just under $200, but I have some perfectly sane reasons for wanting to keep the PowerBook alive as a working machine, and I have an equipment budget to cover the cost.
So I spent much of yesterday re-installing software, running updates, etc., and then ran some benchmarks. Geekbench results for the machine in question were posted last night, here. The Geekbench average for the machine in question is 729 or some such, so the SSD has apparently improved the processor performance a little.
Now, unfortunately, there is not much in Geekbench scores about hard drive performance as such, so as I had XBench scores for the old drive in my files, I ran XBench on the new SSD. It turned out that XBench hard drive scores reported by the SSD were mostly substantially better than — or at the very least comparable to — those of a conventional sata drive in a dual 2.0GHz G5 tower (XBench baseline scores derive from that machine).
The old drive's (80GB, 5400 2.5" OEM drive) overall XBench score was 30.69; the SSD's is reported as 183.66. The XBench baseline for hard drive performance, based on a SATA drive in a dual 2.0GHz G5 tower, is 100 overall. Not bad so far.
To add some perspective, I enclose in [brackets] the test scores from my PowerBook SSD, in {braces} those of the OEM 80GB 2.5" drive, set against the detailed G5 sata drive test numbers that are the baseline in XBench. The first set of numbers in each line is for 4k blocks, the second is for 256k blocks.
Baseline sequential uncached writes of 84.46MB [80.66] {36.99} for 4k and 68MB [80.14] {30.08} for 256k blocks;
baseline sequential uncached reads of 28.29 [24.68] {21.52} and 58.74MB [83.81] {23.39};
baseline random uncached writes of 11.13MB [22.99] {.76} and 36.27MB [85.07] {14.31};
baseline random uncached reads of .7MB [15.78] {.45} and 17.94MB/sec [83.81] {15.21}.
As you can see, all but two of the scores are better from the little PowerBook than the sata in the G5, which is impressive. I also gather that the most important numbers are the random uncached reads, which are reported to be massively improved. Yowsa!
XBench is said to be unreliable, but my subjective sense is that it is not lying in this case. The PowerBook now feels very much more like a current machine than a relic. Web browsing is all of a sudden very pleasant on the thing. I will not be watching Netflix on it any time soon, to be sure, but then, that is not what it is being kept alive to do. I mainly want it simply as a mobile tool for producing text and associated documents on older ppc software, and occasional light web work associated with those tasks.
Good for another couple of years at least.
So I spent much of yesterday re-installing software, running updates, etc., and then ran some benchmarks. Geekbench results for the machine in question were posted last night, here. The Geekbench average for the machine in question is 729 or some such, so the SSD has apparently improved the processor performance a little.
Now, unfortunately, there is not much in Geekbench scores about hard drive performance as such, so as I had XBench scores for the old drive in my files, I ran XBench on the new SSD. It turned out that XBench hard drive scores reported by the SSD were mostly substantially better than — or at the very least comparable to — those of a conventional sata drive in a dual 2.0GHz G5 tower (XBench baseline scores derive from that machine).
The old drive's (80GB, 5400 2.5" OEM drive) overall XBench score was 30.69; the SSD's is reported as 183.66. The XBench baseline for hard drive performance, based on a SATA drive in a dual 2.0GHz G5 tower, is 100 overall. Not bad so far.
To add some perspective, I enclose in [brackets] the test scores from my PowerBook SSD, in {braces} those of the OEM 80GB 2.5" drive, set against the detailed G5 sata drive test numbers that are the baseline in XBench. The first set of numbers in each line is for 4k blocks, the second is for 256k blocks.
Baseline sequential uncached writes of 84.46MB [80.66] {36.99} for 4k and 68MB [80.14] {30.08} for 256k blocks;
baseline sequential uncached reads of 28.29 [24.68] {21.52} and 58.74MB [83.81] {23.39};
baseline random uncached writes of 11.13MB [22.99] {.76} and 36.27MB [85.07] {14.31};
baseline random uncached reads of .7MB [15.78] {.45} and 17.94MB/sec [83.81] {15.21}.
As you can see, all but two of the scores are better from the little PowerBook than the sata in the G5, which is impressive. I also gather that the most important numbers are the random uncached reads, which are reported to be massively improved. Yowsa!
XBench is said to be unreliable, but my subjective sense is that it is not lying in this case. The PowerBook now feels very much more like a current machine than a relic. Web browsing is all of a sudden very pleasant on the thing. I will not be watching Netflix on it any time soon, to be sure, but then, that is not what it is being kept alive to do. I mainly want it simply as a mobile tool for producing text and associated documents on older ppc software, and occasional light web work associated with those tasks.
Good for another couple of years at least.
