Solid State Drive (SSD) in SE/30

[johnklos]

At least temporarily. Acard has flash update programs for Mac OS 9 (maybe 8.6, too), but not for OS X. However, the program to update the SATA-SCSI devices is apparently Windows only. I only upgraded mine because my drive kept spinning down way too often and the newer firmware fixed that.

 

[jellyfin]

Alright. Found an Adaptec 39160 at work and will give this a try.

 

[jellyfin]

It worked! I can boot system 7.5 off of the ssd now. Fantastic. It's a bit pain having to have about 800000 partitions though.

 

[johnklos]

Glad to hear! That drove me crazy for weeks. By the time I thought I knew for certain what it was, the 30 day Windows eXtra Poop activation grace period was up, so I had to reinstall Windows to try the different firmware... Worth it, though!

 

[paws]

The base reference is a 5400 RPM 300 gig Hitachi HTS54323 2.5" SATA drive connected via an Acard ARS-2000SU SATA to UltraSCSI adapter / case.

Hello! That's exactly the kind of thing I want. Where did you get it and how much did you pay?

 

[johnklos]

When I first bought them, they were around $150. For a while they weren't available for less than $200, but it seems the price is a little more reasonable now, back to what I paid:

http://www.google.com/products?q=ARS-2000SU&aq=f

I had a 250 gig 7200 RPM Seagate in one for a while but only because I wasn't using it for anything else. The drive eventually died; not sure if it was because of all the stops and starts (which is why I updated the firmware) or something else, but there's absolutely no speed advantage to a 7200 RPM over a 5400 RPM. On slower machines the rotational latency difference will easily get lost in the noise.

 

[paws]

250GB? Ayy, that's a lot of 2GB partitions...

Thanks for the info.

 

[johnklos]

Ha ha ha... If you're running Mac OS 8.1, you can have one partition at the beginning from which to boot, then use the rest as HFS+. On the other hand, I'm running NetBSD, so I just have a 500 meg Mac partition with System 7.6.1, a NetBSD FFS partition, and a swap partition. The drive now, BTW, is a 320 gig SATA. You can hardly find smaller drives these days.

 

[paws]

A few of the online retailers here list 4 and 8gb SATA SSDs, not cheap (certainly not for the amount of space) but not completely out of reach either. I would like to try this but I'm not sure I will ever get round to it...