SDHC -> 2.5" IDE in an iBook G4: any experiences?

[reekdaddy]

CF is expensive and I have tons of SHDC cards around so I was looking into SDHC to 2.5" IDE connectors. Has anyone had any experience with these in older iBooks?

 

[bizzle]

They are incredibly slow in comparison to even the slowest of 4200rpm IDE hard drives. It's not worth it. They are also not designed to cope with the massive amounts of read/writes a modern OS performs. Beings this is an iBook G4 you have to be running some version of OS X. These SDHC cards vary from 2-10MB/s. Far too slow to be usable.

 

[reekdaddy]

ah, okay, thanks. i would still like an SSD someday, but i might just upgrade the HD.

 

[theos911]

Well, these aren't anywhere near SSD. You can get 2.5 IDE 4 gb medium grade SSD's from Transcend for reasonable prices. They have the near 0 latency of an SSD, but their data transfer rates aren't real astounding for an SSD. I have one in my Frankenlat running win2k and am quite happy with it; it cut boot time in half.

 

[khmann]

A compact flash card _can_ be made to perform very well (I replaced the optical in a Macbook that I used as a car computer for awhile). the trick is to manually align the partition tables and filesystems to erase-block boundaries ie: 64k or higher. this is much more effective with old HFS than HFS+. by all means, disable journalling. I modified 10.4 init scripts to keep my ~library/cache on a ram drive. It was pretty usable... 10.5 has a distinct advantage in that you can disable filesystemaccess time (atime)