Since I never got around to installing my OWC SATA2 SSD into my G4 (Ill probably use bit later in a G5 or X5000).
I was curious what performance gains these things give, so I copied the contents of my i5 laptop's hard drive to the SSD and installed it.
In short, 9 times faster minimum transfer rates, 2.24 times faster maximum transfer rates, 7.88 times faster on average.
73 times faster access times, but a slower burst rate and a slightly higher cpu usage.

Overall though, pretty freaking amazing. Especially if you consider this involves replacing an SATA3 hard drive with an SATA2 SSD.

From now on, mechical drives are purely back up devices for me.

So, what drives outside of OWC have been working in the G5 (I've heard some mention of certain Samsung drives) and what works best in the X5000?

I had one in my PC, but gave it to my parents for their laptop. Performance was bottlenecked by the SATA bus, and having to make symlinks everywhere because it was too small to fit a whole running system on (256 GB) was a pain in the ass. My RAID0 performed not much worse and was much, much, much bigger.

Then I went back to SSD, tempted by promises of speed - this time an M.2 module on a PCI-E card. It's about 1000 MB/s read and write. But again, most of my stuff, including games, can't be on it (256MB again) and has to be symlinked...

One of the worrying parts is that this one tracks its wear via SMART. It drops around 1% wear every time I restore an image backup. To reduce wear hibernate must be turned off, and any kind of cache or anything is sager moved to a mechanical drive, which negates the performance enhancement of having it in the first place.

I could live without it again. Really. When it does I'll probably go back to all-mechanical. It's not so bad if you RAID it.

Apart from small volume for the buck, writes are the achilles heel of SSD, even today. You won't see that on MorphOS for sure, but on a write-heavy OS like Windows or Linux it feels too much like a ticking timebomb for my liking. For most people that will fall in the lifespan of their computer, but I've been using my PC now for 8 years and will hopefully be using it for 8 more, and I doubt the SSD will survive the trip.

Yes, they seem to have a limited lifespan.
My first failed within months, with no warning.
And under Windows there are several setting that help them perform better.

MorphOS should be kinder to these devices.
And the speed increases I am getting are amazing. My Windows i7 laptop now boots almost as fast as my MorphOS hardware

@KennyR

Never had an SSD fail and I've ditched mechanical for anything but data storage years ago.

Bout them being too small under Win, I assume there isn't something like the "FusionDrive" tech in OSX available?

Quote:

You will (have them fail), if anything, they seem to have a shorter duty cycle than mechanical drives.
BUT, who cares?

They kick ass.

And limited capacity? The first (the one that died) was 120GB, perfect for MorphOS.
The current drive I mentioned is 256GB, and I could get a 500GB or larger now for the price I paid for that.

Frankly, I don't need 2 TB (and larger) drives. I have a few and their only real utility is holding hundreds of movie files.

[ Edited by Jim 19.05.2019 - 14:43 ]

Quote:

I've never had one fail either. However, when they do fail, they tend to do it all at once with no warning. No pings, no clicking, no failed SMART. Just a sudden freeze and an undetectable drive on reboot. And as I come from the UK, I only get a year warranty. And as the UK are a bunch of xenophobic right-wing morons, soon I'll only get a three month warranty.

Quote:

There are hardware solutions. My chipset is predates this. I don't know any software solutions that work - Windows stuff like ReadyBoost are certainly not that. Besides, constantly moving all your most accessed files back and forth from an SSD, even transparently, sounds like you're making it even more likely to fail.

And Intel chipsets tend to be like women you pick up in crappy bars. There's a chance you're onto a good one, but a much greater chance you'll soon discover why she was alone in a crappy bar.

[ Edited by KennyR 19.05.2019 - 14:53 ]

3 months, 1 year or more doesn't really matter as with a typical MorphOS usage pattern it will be long out of warranty before it fails.

FusionDrive is 100% SW btw (tried it on a MPro before getting a proper sized SSD) and with a large enough SSD part it will move stuff on and off.

Another option are Hybrid drives, had a smaller Seagate in my PMacG5 when it was regularly used. Well to be honest it's still in there and will be for the foreseeable future for being completely stuck in the drive bay.....

Yeah, an OS like MorphOS is so light on SSD (especially as it lacks constant writes, unlike Windows or Linux), there's no reason why they wouldn't last practically forever. But the same was also true of hard drives. I bet MOS puts less wear on a drive in 20 years than Linux or Windows does in a month.

But given that MorphOS is such a light OS, it begs the question why anyone with MorphOS would need an SSD, as MOS zips along on practically anything. But that begs the question of why anyone would use MorphOS at all, of which the answer is the same:

Because they want to.

Quote:

It's 2yrs. For now anyway lol

https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers/consumer-contracts-guarantees/consumer-guarantees/index_en.htm

Statutory warranty was always just a year in the UK unfortunately. Longer than that and you had to either go for the manufacturer's warranty (which isn't worth the paper it's written on), or lodge a claim with the company under EU directive 1999/44/EC and be prepared to take it to court - as they'll probably ignore it. Or, use that five/six year partial refund law which will almost certainly not work for you, especially for electronic goods.

The one year warranty is the only one that is a no-quibble return. Anything else and you'll probably be told that how you used the item, regardless of how you used it, was the wrong way and not supported by the terms of service. I hear Jeff Bezos is already salivating heavily at the prospect of bouncing millions of Amazon customers out of their warranties.

> what drives outside of OWC have been working in the G5 [...]?

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=12297&forum=11

Thanks Andreas. I remember that thread. So it still looks like Samsung might be the best alternative.

Quote:

Yes and no. We have less writes, but since nothing is properly aligned and there is no file system any write will cause multiple write cycles. Especially when the file system is using 512 byte blocks.

Also you should note that flash drives also write, when only used as read only media. This is because the memory cells need to be refreshed after a few read cycles and the controller performs a read/write cycles on its own.

However. I use flash drives in most of my MorphOS systems. One of them in daily use and another is running 24/7 as a server. I did not have an issue. Same goes for linux on SSD. I even have an external usb case with an 480GB drive, it works for years and deals with around 20GB writes a week. I always bought the cheapest SanDisk SSDs (Extreme II, Extreme III, SSD PLUS) and they all worked fine even in my G5 because their build in controller supports SATA 1, 2 and 3 unlike most other SSDs.

Also the wear level controllers are quite smart and deal even large things like standby/wakeup cycles on windows quite well.

The bigger the drive is you buy, the more robust is the drive when it comes to wear leveling as there are more blocks to wear.


[ Edited by geit 21.05.2019 - 23:58 ]

Good info, Geit,
Sandisk...I'll remember that.
And everyone should look at my OWC failure as a cautionary tale.
Just because you spend more, and you think you bought the best solution, there may still be a better choice out there.

Do your research.
That's one of the reasons I started this thread.
You guys are a vital resource.