SSD

SSDs That Work #CrowdSourcing

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‘m thankful for emails from some regular readers, especially in response to my trial and error adventures with new SSDs. So, it’s time for us to try to put a list together of the top 5-6 recommended drives that work with our G5s.

Please use the comments below. I’ll also be posting a thread in the MacRumors PowerPC forum to generate some responses as well.

Drives That Work

  • OWC drives obviously work. These are the safest options, although they are rarely on sale like other drives. You can likely save money going elsewhere, but if you want a guarantee that they will work in your Mac, these are a solid choice.
  • The Intel SSD 320 works perfectly in various configurations.
  • The Samsung 840 EVO works fine but only in the lower drive bay.
  • Corsair F60GB2 (and likely its larger capacity siblings) work fine. It is an SATA II model.

Drives That Do Not Work

  • Intel 520 SSDs do not work. (I will admit that I’ve had one reader who has had success using them in Linux, so it could be a Mac OS X thing not necessarily a G5 thing. I was not able to get them working in Mac OS X.)
  • Intel 530 SSDs also do not work.
  • The PNY Optima SSD with Silicon Motion controller does not work in any configuration.

I’ll be updating this with more information and notes as I get other suggestions.

It sounds like there are several troubleshooting options when trying to get your SSD to work in a G5. First, remove any other drives, and try it solo. Put the drive in either bay – upper or lower – to see if you get different results. Second, if you are trying to use two drives in the G5, experiment with the other drive being SATA I. You may only be able to have one SATA III or II drive at a time in your G5 configuration, although it appears this varies based on the different chipsets and manufacturers of the drives. Third, pay attention to the version of Leopard that you are installing from. Later versions may be better able to see and partition your SSD.

Stay tuned for more info to come.

— Nathan

The Saga of the SSD

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My New Year’s resolution has been to get a larger SSD working in my Power Mac G5. It did not start out well.

I’ve detailed elsewhere about my first bad experience with a PNY Optima at a steal of a price. Darn, I wished that thing worked.

Next up was a 120 GB Intel 520 SSD at a nice sale price from Amazon for around $60. I noted on my own hardware page on this site that it should be a good and solid drive to use. Some G5 owners seemed to have gotten it to work. When the package arrived in the mail, I went to work, dropping it into my G5 and hoping that I would not see the same symptoms that I saw with the PNY.

And then, the drive didn’t show up.

It was like a ghost. My machine booted without trouble. It acted like nothing was wrong. The drive would not make an appearance in Disk Utility at all via the app or command line.

So, once again, troubled but undeterred, I sent it back. This time, I ordered a OWC drive that was guaranteed to work in my G5. I paid $10 more than the Intel, but at least my journey would come to an end.

OWC Mercury SSD

And then, this drive didn’t show up in Disk Utility either.

Now, I was confused. I tried my troubleshooting steps. I put it into a different bay, which can be a problem with some configurations on Power Mac G5s. (This really needs more exploration.) I made sure it was correctly plugged in. I put it into a USB drive to make sure it was operational – it was! At this point, even though my old SSD worked just as normal when slotted back in its place, I was beginning to think I was having serious motherboard issues.

Now, let me offer the twist – all along, I had removed my original SSD in place of this new SSD. My plan was to reinstall Leopard from a Time Machine backup that resided on the other internal hard drive I have in the G5. To do this, I planned to use my Leopard DVD (10.5.2) to boot, but whenever I went into Disk Utility from that install DVD, the SSD never appeared – not for the Intel 520 nor the OWC.

On a whim, I put my G5 into Firewire target disk mode and connected it to my Mac Mini G4. Upon boot, I was greeted with Finder’s familiar and suddenly very friendly warning that I had inserted an uninitialized disk. “Would I like to initialize it?” Of course! From this G4 running 10.5.8, Disk Utility saw the SSD and was gladly willing to partition and format it for me. Once again though, the Leopard DVD refused to see this now initialized drive, so I ended up using Carbon Copy Cloner, that external USB drive, and my G4 to clone the hard drives, bless them, and begin my new adventure with my OWC SSD. Wow.

Here is what we know:

  • The PNY Optima drive, especially the version with the Silicon Motion controller, does not work in a G5 in any configuration.
  • The Intel 520 SSD probably does not work, although I don’t believe I tried putting it into Firewire target disk mode and connecting it to the G4.
  • OWC SSDs do work.
  • If your Leopard install DVD is at 10.5.2 or below, it may not have the appropriate drivers, kernel extensions, or something else to see newer drives. I don’t know what different versions of Leopard install DVDs exist, so if anyone else has some clarity, I’d love to include it on the website.

Using old Macs like these G5s is always an adventure. I’m just glad in my case there was a happy ending.

BTW, we now have search on the left side of this page.

Learning things the hard way

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Sometimes, we G5 owners have to learn things the hard way.

In the midst of holiday sales, I ended up with a $10 off coupon to Best Buy in my inbox. I also noted that a decent PNY Optima SSD, 240Gb in size, was on sale. With an extra $10 off, this was a solid deal to upgrade my G5. I ordered online and picked it up from the local Best Buy. So excited to get this thing going, I almost ended up being late to an event I had that evening.

Here’s the bad news – it didn’t work. In my haste to grab this solid deal, I neglected my own research on SATA III devices and Power Mac G5s. While I assume there might be 1 or 2 out there that work, SATA III drives often cause funny, bizarre symptoms on our older Macs. Yes, the drives might say they are compatible with older SATA I or II standards, but that doesn’t always mean what it’s supposed to mean. (I even note this on my Hardware page about how some SSD drives have jumpers to make them run in a safer compatibility mode.) This PNY Optima did not have any jumpers, but I had hoped I would be lucky. I figured it would magically work for me.

What were some of the symptoms? It acted like it was having motherboard issues, power management issues, or even a dead PRAM battery. I was certain it was these problems, so I tried everything in the book. I reseated the RAM. I pressed the CUDA switch on the motherboard. I reset the PRAM. The Mac would not boot from anything, including the Leopard install DVD on an external Firewire drive. At worst, it froze. At best, it flashed the dreaded System Folder question mark.

Some have found that SSDs work better in a different bay on your G5, so I even tried that. No luck.

But when I took out that new SSD and plopped in the old Corsair F60, the G5 booted up just like normal. No motherboard issues. All that work for naught. I ended up returning the SSD and decided to wait for another decent deal on a more compatible SSD down the road.

Is there a lesson to be learned? One: G5 owners are slowly (and sometimes rapidly) getting left behind. Two: always do some googling, read some reviews, and rely on some of the experience of the PPC community. Three: SSDs are awesome and finicky creatures.

In other news, you can grab an updated build of TenFourFoxG5 that promises to work a little bit better on dual core machines. I know they’d love your feedback over there. Also, a security hole in the NTPD server/process, although you may not be technically affected.

— Nathan

A Burning Question: What about IDE SSDs?

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The most common question I have gotten from old Mac enthusiasts is the possibility of IDE SSDs to speed up their machines.

Here’s the good news – I have an answer.

But there is bad news too – the common brands you might find available on NewEgg or eBay are generally not recommended. These brands include Transcend and KingSpec. They will work, but the companies that make them are generally not well regarded. You end up spending your cash on slower products with possibly sketchy support.

The good news is that you can follow the advice on my website. Pick up a solid Sandforce drive, like the nicely priced Intel 530, and pair it with an SATA-to-IDE converter. Buying an OWC IDE SSD drive is essentially the same thing, but you might save a buck or two by assembling it on your own. You will want to over-provision the drive to extend its life and performance.

The bonus is that if you do want to move that SSD to a SATA equipped machine, like your recently acquired bargain bin Power Mac G5, you can reuse it as needed.

For older G4 Macs, this gives you an opportunity to get a long lasting, speedy drive to keep your machine a little more relevant for the time being.

I picked up an old G4 Mac Mini, and I’ll update a post or two with how the process of rehabbing that machine goes.

– Nathan

Overprovisioning

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One of the most interesting things to consider when grabbing an SSD for your Power Mac G5 is the concept of overprovisioning.

It’s a confusing concept – but here it is in a nutshell.

Hard drives and SSDs don’t really have a delete command. Instead, when the operating system is told to delete a file, it marks a table saying this place in the hard drive is empty. For traditional platter hard drives, this just meant the OS telling the hard drive to write the data in that certain place. Everybody was happy.

But with SSDs, things get tricky. SSDs use NAND flash memory which cannot be easily written over like traditional hard drives. They must be first erased for the new data to be able to be written. So, theoretically, a SSD could fill up to 100% capacity and not be able to write any new data at all, even your operating system caches and page files and what not. When that happens, the SSD takes a serious nose dive in performance. To counter this, SSDs tend to have support for things like TRIM, which tells the SSD to put certain spots of the drive into some sort of garbage collection. Quietly in the background, the SSD will erase those blocks that are empty so data can be written and read at a normal, brisk pace.

More good news – almost all SSDs are built with some overprovisioning, meaning that some space of the drive is set aside as clean empty space for things to get shifted about when stuff is getting deleted and organized.

Here’s the bad news – Power Mac G5s do not have TRIM support via our now dated operating system choices of Tiger or Leopard. Without TRIM, your SSD bears the risk of running ragged in its performance, especially if you max out the drive with data. With every block having been written (if you do max it out), there is no mechanism to tell the SSD to free up deleted space even if you get rid of all of those apps, movies, games, and so on. This is the problem of using a SSD in a system without TRIM support.

In response, it is possible to overprovision even more than factory standard. You do this by first deleting the drive via a secure erase in Disk Utility. Then you create a partition that is smaller than the capacity of the drive. I hear 10-20% is often recommended. A 240GB drive might then look like a 220GB drive on your Mac. The extra space is then seen as not used by the operating system and always empty. Even when your SSD gets close to full, there will still be free space for the SSD to shift things around and keep its somewhat zippy performance up. If you do fill the hard drive to the brim, you may still see performance degradation but it may not be as severe.

There is a lot of debate about this. Many SSDs have some other built-in features to counter a lack of trim. Sandforce drives in particular have some pretty aggressive garbage collection, so you shouldn’t see degradation at all unless you really just torture that drive. That’s why I’ve seen Sandforce drives as the top recommends for G5s, especially the Intel 520/530 series. Even without overprovisioning (beyond factory settings) or TRIM, it’s likely that you may never see performance degradation for a long time. By a year or two, it might be time to upgrade your SSD anyway, right?

Here’s some additional reading:

– Nathan