PowerMac G4 Video card an TRIM question

[judd sandage]

Question for you guys, what would be a good video card for a first gen power mac G4 450mhz? it is an AGP model with what I assume is its stock ATI video card. Also I bought a 120GB SSD for it and was wondering how to get TRIM working on the drive within OSX 10.4.11, or some way of getting it to work, or at least curtailing its quick demise under HFS+

 

[Cory5412]

Video card: It depends what you want to do. The stock video card should be a Rage128, which is "fine". OS 9 will be OK on that card. Mac OS X really does want newer GPUs, especially if you go all the way forward to 10.4 or 10.5.

OS versions that old do not support TRIM. At all. I believe that was enabled years and years later. 10.10.4/10.11 was when it became possible to use trim on third party SSDs at all. It looks like TRIM was first added in 10.7 "Lion" in 2011.

If your SSD is midrange or better, it might garbage collect or TRIM itself at intervals. It's better if you're relying on this that you don't fill the SSD very aggressively, so if you're planning on, like, putting a giant iTunes library on your boot volume, buy a bigger SSD to do it. Newer SSDs on a SATA card or on an IDE to SATA adapter will generally do better, and another thing you may do or may need to do (I've seen some odd behavior described) is set your partition to be a little bit smaller than the stated capacity of the SSD. I have a friend who had to format their 128GB SSD at around 110GB for OS 9 to play with it nicely, for example.

 

[judd sandage]

ok, well this will be a bridge PC for my Macintosh TV, a more modern computer to allow me to transfer files to and from using Zip or floppy to the MacTV, cause there a a bunch of old games I want to play on that thing. but as far as the G4 itself, maybe a few period games, and maybe a little web surfing, so not much with it, I might do like a 70GB partition for OSX and a 30GB for OS 9 then. I might never use OS 9 for more then checking it out though. (I'm a windows guy, never really dealt with apple outside of school, my first computer was a Commodore 64, second an XT clone)

for the video card, I was thinking about trying for a 9800pro if I could, never had one.

 

[bibilit]

Concerning the Video Card, i flashed an ATI 8500 (PC) series a couple of years ago pretty easily.

Still working fine today.

 

[Cory5412]

What OS are you running on your Mac TV?

Those machines can have Ethernet added, and if you're running 7.5.5 with OpenTransport and all the OT/AppleShare updates installed, you can connect to vtools directly.  If you're running 7.1, you'll want to either use floppy or other removable media to do the transfers, or boot into OS 9, which can talk localtalk directly to system 7.1 [with whatever enablers], which is what the Mac TV shipped with, and which might be best to use, because the Mac TV is limited in how much RAM it can use.

(Actually come to think of it, 7.1+MacTCP or the versions of OpenTransport it supports and an FTP client should also be able to connect to VTools or your newer Mac or other machine, but, over FTP.)

 

[judd sandage]

I would be willing to try, what kind of adapters would I need for getting the Macintosh TV with ethernet? I tried looking for one but everything seemed to be an internal connection, and there is no expansion on the MacTV.

also its currently running 7.1, though I do have a 7.6.1 disc I can install on it, and the G4 I just upgraded to 10.4.11, though I still need to get 9.2.2 on there as well.

 

[Cory5412]

Just had to look this up. It appears the TV does not, as I had presumed it did, have LC PDS.

You would be looking for SCSI Ethernet, such as the Asante EN/SC series in that case.