[HN Gopher] I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD
___________________________________________________________________
I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 143 points
Date : 2024-04-01 02:58 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (boredzo.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (boredzo.org)
| lukateras wrote:
| Macs of that era are so beautiful...
|
| I have an early 2003 12" PowerBook G4 with a 512 GB M.2 SSD.
| Setting up NetBSD with GRUB to work around
| <https://gnats.netbsd.org/22316>.
|
| (The original hard drive is somewhere still; now I'm going to
| cover its hole, too!)
| m463 wrote:
| A friend of mine had one of these. It had a very nice keyboard,
| with curved keys and a sort of homey feel.
| lukateras wrote:
| It's even edge-to-edge! Something that the current MacBook
| lineup doesn't feature.
| barrenko wrote:
| Logitech Wave Keys remined me (slightly) of it.
| SpecialistK wrote:
| I respect anyone brave or foolish enough to do a drive swap on a
| iBook.
| wannacboatmovie wrote:
| I've performed this procedure numerous times. While it's not
| particularly difficult, it requires patience - a LOT of
| patience. Dozens of the world's smallest Philips-head screws.
| The iFixit guide helps tremendously.
|
| What strikes me as nostalgic is how _repairable_ these machines
| were. No proprietary screws, the HDD used a standard (at the
| time) form factor and interface. The batteries could even be
| torn down and rebuilt as they used standard cylindrical cells
| inside. Hell, the keyboard could be replaced without opening
| the cover! The only thing that was proprietary was the Airport
| card - which was under the keyboard along with the SODIMM slot,
| and both could likewise be replaced without opening the laptop.
| Those days are long gone.
|
| One item of note is I suspect the older versions of OS X lack
| SSD TRIM support.
| SpecialistK wrote:
| Sadly I'm a below-average laptop repairman. My iBook G3 was
| never the same after I did it (with said guide) - much of the
| wrist-rest now acts as a click on the mouse and the CD drive
| ejection mech isn't happy. I could probably fix it with some
| time and effort, but I honestly never want to open it again.
| Kudos to you for having it down.
|
| I too lament how closed machines have become and how it
| affects the environment, data recovery, and just plain ol'
| repair. Some of those PCI Macs with 603s, 604s and G3s could
| get up to G4e with CPU boards and industry-standard PCI cards
| (so long as they had a Mac driver.) Now you can't even add
| your own storage to most Macs, and the one with PCIe won't
| let you use your own graphics card.
| i386 wrote:
| There used to be a TRIM program you could install. Used one
| when I swapped out the super drive for an ssd in a 2012
| MacBook Pro (I think at around the same time?)
| wiredfool wrote:
| I replaced a keyboard on a unibody MacBook pro. 52 absolutely
| tiny screws to hold it in.
| goosedragons wrote:
| Newer models have the keyboard riveted in. Hugh Jefferys
| replaced one and it seems bonkers to do.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1Purem1NF0
| drooopy wrote:
| The clamshell iBook G3 was one of the hardest laptops to take
| apart, ever.
| bluedino wrote:
| I remember the first RAM/HD upgrade I did on a Unibody
| MacBook...mind-blowing simple. _Most_ laptops were such a pain
| to work on before that.
|
| Edit: I remember some models having the drive in a bay and the
| RAM in an easily accessible panel (or under the keyboard), but
| most were a sandwich of tiny panels and cables.
| SpecialistK wrote:
| I had a Unibody Aluminum MacBook (the 2008 model) and yeah...
| flip the battery lid, one screw for the HDD.
|
| That machine had thermal issues, but HDD and RAM was easy.
| BizarreByte wrote:
| I've done it before and it's easy assuming you 1) keep track of
| every screw (egg trays work nicely, and 2) have a lot of
| patience.
|
| Haven't killed one of these machines yet, nor have I ever had
| "spare parts" after.
| trm42 wrote:
| Happened to upgrade my PowerMac G4 Digital Audio model with OWC's
| PATA SSD (actually was SATA SSD with PATA adapter), It wasn't a
| slouch with the probably original PATA HDD but SSD made things
| even faster and I don't have to worry about 20+ years old HDD
| dying out that much. That SSD saturates the Ultra ATA/66 IDE Bus
| completely which feels awesome.
|
| Of course when used with Mac OS Classic, the OS is the biggest
| bottle neck because of it's bad multi-tasking capabilities. That
| OS reminds me of things we take granted these days, like computer
| not locking almost completely when decompressing zip package.
| lloeki wrote:
| > Tiger's dd doesn't have status=progress
|
| Maybe sending it SIGINFO (^T in terminal) could help? Dunno if
| it's supported as far back as Tiger's.
|
| (BSD thing, it's SIGUSR1 on GNU dd / Linux, the usability
| difference is that on darwin the terminal can conveniently send
| SIGINFO via ^T)
| i386 wrote:
| I believe it was!
| thesuitonym wrote:
| I need to commit this to memory, I often forget to send
| stats=progress to dd. Thanks for the tip!
| exitb wrote:
| It's great fun to put SSDs in retro machines, but I usually opt
| to use SLC drives for SSD-unaware operating systems. It
| supposedly can have two orders of magnitude more cycles before
| the cells start to die. On the other hand, there's lots of
| conflicting information out there, so not sure if it really makes
| that much of a difference.
| eisa01 wrote:
| You probably don't run 24/7 disk activity on these retro
| machines, so SLC is probably not worth it?
| jsheard wrote:
| Especially now that the consumer SSD market has entirely
| moved on to TLC and QLC, there isn't a new SLC drive you can
| buy for a reasonable price anymore. Even if a TLC drive would
| wear out more quickly in an old SSD-unaware system, they are
| so cheap at this point that it's not really worth worrying
| about.
| ndiddy wrote:
| I think it's worth worrying about on an iBook. The hard
| drive is in between the motherboard and the palmrest, so
| replacing it basically involves taking the entire machine
| completely apart (including having to deal with a ton of
| really tight snap points). It's definitely not something
| you want to do more than once, and I'm not sure how many
| disassembly cycles the 20 year old plastic can take.
| jsheard wrote:
| If you do want some insurance, the old over-provisioning
| trick should still work to prolong the life of the drive
| when used in a system that doesn't support TRIM. Format
| the drive on a modern system that does support TRIM, or
| secure erase it with the manufacturers utility, then
| create a partition which doesn't fill the entire drive
| and use that on the classic system that doesn't support
| TRIM. As long as the system never writes to the
| unpartitioned area it will remain in the TRIMed state and
| allow the SSD controller to use it as slack space.
| ndiddy wrote:
| Great tip, I haven't heard of that before.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Particularly if you're running OS 9 or older Classic Mac OS,
| as it barely does anything that isn't user-initiated, which
| naturally means a lot less disk activity.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Even if you did, there's no way it could ever write so much
| data
| numpad0 wrote:
| Old tryhard MLC/TLC controllers tended to lock up and/or slow
| down when used for boot disks and/or used with OS that had no
| ATA TRIM command support to explicitly unallocate disk
| sectors. For this reason, SLC disks and CompactFlash under
| 8GB were used to be recommended. But that's like 10 years
| ago.
| RogerPollack wrote:
| It definitely speeds up the data transfer rate and makes them a
| lot faster, a better experience. Sadly you're still limited to
| 1 processor core in a world where most computers that are in
| active use have at least have 2 processor cores.
|
| For example I bought a "PiStorm" for my Amiga 1200 computer
| that uses the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B for processing power (RTG
| Graphics, RAM, and data storage too via the SD card) and it
| made my Amiga 1200 useable for daily driving but it's the 4
| core Raspberry Pi 4 Model B doing all the heavy lifting, not
| the Amiga. All I use is the keyboard and the proprietary
| bespoke chips when playing games that "hit the hardware".
| johnklos wrote:
| Yeah - I've killed several "fancy" Samsung SSDs due to spending
| lots of time in swap. One might think a 25 MHz VAX SOC
| (VAXstation 4000/30) with 24 megs of memory wouldn't be able to
| do I/Os fast enough to kill a modern SSD within the span of
| several years, but one would be wrong :)
| marban wrote:
| I maxed out my G4 Cube with an SSD, ATI card and a Sonnet Encore
| CPU to push it to 1.25Ghz -- To this date still my most inspiring
| machine and just lovely for the occasional ReBirth session.
| rocketbop wrote:
| For the majority of readers who probably won't know what that
| is, ReBirth was a soft synthesiser that was the precursor to
| Propellerheads Reason, one of the most famous DAWs.
| officeplant wrote:
| Hey there are dozens of us out here still using rebirth. ;)
| AlgoRitmo wrote:
| I thought he was referring to Final Fantasy
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| ReBirth was also notable for modeling its original
| functionality off of real hardware: two Roland 303s and an
| 808 (hence the full name ReBirth RB-338); they later added
| the 909. And if I recall, 808 sample patches were originally
| a community hack, but Propellerheads later embraced the
| concept (also for the 909), supporting audio patches along
| with GUI skins in later releases. I suspect this is part of
| what inspired the direction they took with Reason.
| jwells89 wrote:
| The G4 desktops are all pretty cool machines. One of these days
| I'd like to get ahold of a Quicksilver/MDD motherboard and see
| if I can figure out a way to fit it into a modern ATX case. The
| original tower cases were neat but not great in the airflow or
| noise departments, and with a growing number of G4 original
| PSUs failing it's useful to be able to house a standard ATX PSU
| without case hacks.
| garyiskidding wrote:
| Pretty cool.
|
| I did that to a 2009 mac mini ( with an external USB-SSD) .. and
| it came back to life. Still use it for running some jobs.
| RogerPollack wrote:
| This is not an easy task. For those of you that don't know the
| iBook G4's logic board and hard drive are essential hermetically
| sealed in the plastic case AND a second layer of metal. I ruined
| my first iBook G4 when attempting this same upgrade as the ribbon
| cables that connect the power button and LEDs ripped in half from
| age (very brittle). I bought another used iBook G4. It still has
| the stock 60 GB hard disk and now the slot-loading "Super Drive"
| is dead so I will have to fix it eventually If I want to keep
| using it. I actually bought a used PowerPC G4 MacBook Pro to use
| and these are WAY easier to work on, just a few screws and you
| have access to everything.
|
| I will note to anyone reading this the EUR79 Amiga-like Morph OS
| is really good experience on these 32-bit single core PowerPC
| Macs, very snappy. I also installed Debian 12 Trixie using the
| Sid branch on my iBook G4 via the USB-A port and using guides
| (and links to files to get WiFi working) on the Mac Rumours forum
| I got it working perfectly. Using the Window Maker Window Manager
| it's snappy and you get NeXTStep?OPENSTEP experience.
| pocketsand wrote:
| I hosed an iBook G4 repairing a hard drive back in the day.
| Oops
| RogerPollack wrote:
| It is easily done. The IFIXIT guide mentions it for anyone
| interested.
|
| https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iBook+G4+12-Inch+800+MHz-1.2+GH.
| ..
|
| "The connectors at the ends of the cables are attached very
| firmly to the sockets on the logic board. Pulling directly on
| the cable will either separate the cable from its connector
| or the socket from the logic board."
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > the iBook G4's logic board and hard drive are essential
| hermetically sealed in the plastic case AND a second layer of
| metal.
|
| The CPU's heatsink is attached via adhesive. That is not "a
| hermetic seal."
| nottorp wrote:
| Ouch!
|
| I did the ssd upgrade to a G4 PowerBook* and it wasn't that
| dangerous. Nothing glued. Jut had some geek fun with 2 friends,
| all worrying about the tiny tiny screws and short and fragile
| cables.
|
| If the iBooks are glued together, that's a totally different
| animal.
|
| * unfortunately the GPU needs a reballing and without it the
| laptop only displays right in cold weather or for the first
| half an hour since power up :(
| rpmisms wrote:
| I did a LOT of work on my iBook back in the day. I never found
| it too challenging, maybe it was because it's how I learned.
| Pesthuf wrote:
| Ah. So this is what Apple did to force you to buy their super
| expensive storage before custom drives and serialization.
| AltruisticGapHN wrote:
| I put an SSD in a MacBook pro late 2009 and I love it! I
| installed Windows 10 and Ubuntu 22.04.
|
| I tried compiling my website with a php/apache and a mariadb
| containers in docker. I thought that maybe Vite would take
| forever to compile but no it ran almost the same as my current
| PC. I was really amazed at how well it all still runs. The main
| lag I noticed is when you move from page to page the Vite server
| takes up to a second to deliver the JS, although it is a bit
| faster when you move back to the same pages.
|
| Sublime Text latest version is smooth as butter.
|
| In Windows 10 I'm able to play Guild Wars, emulators like
| DuckStation and SameBoy. The GeForce 9400M is still pretty
| capable. Tomb Raider Anniversary.
|
| I have never replaced the battery! I did a battery full charge
| and store the laptop at 50% charge, at first it was 2-3times a
| year and in recent years I even forgot and charged it only once a
| year. It still shows ~90% full charge capacity. With just
| browsing and casual use including YouTube the battery runs for at
| least a couple hours!
|
| When I first booted up this old MacBook, it was an old version of
| macOS. It looked so dated that it felt like the laptop was good
| for the bin. I needed a laptop as I move into a co-loc
| arrangement, something to keep busy until I can set up a new desk
| etc and I'm really stoked how well it still runs and how usable
| it is.
|
| The funniest part of all that is ... wait for it... I OPENED the
| MacBook Pro and upgraded the RAM and the HDD. HHAHAHAHAHAHAAH.
| It's gotta be the joke of the century. Someday it will be.
|
| With that said for this late 2009 MacBook Pro these are the main
| downsides :
|
| - the screen is probably the main downside : all the colours look
| off unless you are totally facing, which means bad posture, and
| the brighter colours tend to be washed out so you can't really do
| any decent UX work as all the subtle gradients and color tones
| are out the window
|
| - stuck with USB 2
|
| - VSCode is pretty usable but you can hear the fans revving up,
| CPU usage constantly up and down anywhere from 10 to 90% peaks
|
| When I revived the laptop I did in this order:
|
| First I installed Ubuntu 22.04 from a USB key, this worked right
| out of the bat, I told the installer to just erase the disk. It
| worked like a charm.
|
| Later I realized I wanted Windows for games. This MBP models
| apparently won't let you install Windows from a USB key -
| something to do with the baked in BIOS? I really couldn't bother
| burning a DVD, fortunately I had an old OG copy of Windows 7 Home
| Edition Upgrade. I booted the DVD and installed Windows 7, using
| a generic activation key. Then I inserted a USB key with the
| Windows 10 ISO which I had prepared earlier, and started the
| upgrade from within Windows 7. This time I used a key I bought
| online. The activation didn't work as planned, I called the
| Microsoft call center, and I just told the person I bought an OEM
| key etc and they activated it.
|
| So at this point I could simply hold the Alt key while booting to
| select the drive and it was dual booting perfectly fine.
|
| However I ran into one limitation : I was not able to `mount` the
| Windows NTFS partition from within Ubuntu. It seems this could be
| baked in the custom Apple BIOS? The Ubuntu partition somehow can
| not see the "bootcamp" partition.
|
| I installed reFIT thinking that it would solve the issue but it
| didn't change anything, just gave me a boot menu that is uglier
| and doesn't give me any functionality. I wish I didn't install
| reFIT but it's not a big deal it just shows me an icon for Ubuntu
| and Windows - honestly the builtin menu on the MBP looks nicer
| and I believe you could also customize the original boot menu's
| icons (but I am not sure I would have been able to do this after
| nuking the macOS partition).
|
| I'm really thrilled with how well it has been running for me the
| last couple weeks. Been playing a ton of Guild Wars on it.
|
| There's such a satisfaction from making an old hardware not just
| usable, but actually really useful. And I love that being so old,
| I don't have to worry about scratching it - even if mine still
| looks like mint.
| tempoponet wrote:
| I also put an SSD in my 2009 MBP - in 2011! It was $500 for a
| 256gb drive and it was worth every penny.
|
| Even though that drive is slow and expensive by today's
| standards, I don't know if it ever really bottlenecked the
| system. The 8gb ram ultimately couldn't keep up with hungry
| chrome tabs and electron apps of the mid 2010's.
| AltruisticGapHN wrote:
| Yep the 8GB RAM is definitely a limit. I haven't done much
| coding on it yet tbh, for the light use I make of docker
| (php/apache/mariadb/vueJS) the RAM seems just ok. And it
| wouldnt run games that require more RAM anyway. (ps: for
| VSCode I did what was suggested online and turned off a bunch
| of extensions I don't really need).
|
| In my case I had a left over 240 GB Samsung SSD from my last
| PC build. Replaced it with a 1TB nvme. So it was nice to also
| use a left over SSD. :)
|
| Since then I read I could put a 1TB in it if I wanted - but
| that seems overkill as it's going to be more of a backup
| laptop.
|
| What makes the experience so nice is in Ubuntu it would also
| show a nice popup for the media keys like volume up/down and
| brightness.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Lucky on the battery.. ours started swelling after about 7-8
| years of heavy use, and made the trackpad click by itself. I
| think I also had to replace the display cable and one of the
| ram slots stopped working. Other than that it was a solid
| computer for about 10 years until we replaced it with a 2012
| model, still in use.
| AltruisticGapHN wrote:
| I wasn't luck with my iPod Nano 3rd Gen however. Recently
| took it out of the box and I had the same issue with the
| battery swelling.
|
| The battery pushed on the screen causing a dark spot. It is
| apparently a common issue with iPods. I will order a
| replacement battery and fingers crossed I can also revive
| this little guy. While it was connected with the cable it
| worked great. And there is an app called Flooza or something
| that's kinda like a light iTunes that let you manage
| everything on it.
|
| I didn't make a heavy use of the MBP so there's that. Took it
| to India though! It survived a night long trip from Delhi to
| Dharamshala. There was such insane potholes and the bus was
| shaking so much, and the laptop was in my baggage at the
| underside of the bus. I thought it was done for :P
|
| I guess it's a nice thing about old hardware is they have a
| story.
| AltruisticGapHN wrote:
| Now I remember the last time I checked my "battery cycle log"
| on macOS before I did the win/ubuntu installation it was
| about ~70 cycles so probably much lower than most users. This
| was in February 2024.
|
| The laptop was always a backup so that may explain why the
| battery lasted so long. Still I was impressed as in recent
| years I procrastinated on the battery maintenance and didnt
| charge it in a couple years.
| Uvix wrote:
| Tomb Raider Anniversary is from 2007. I wouldn't count it as an
| indication of how capable the GPU still is.
| Wonnk13 wrote:
| Back in the day I removed the optical drive of my iBook g4 to add
| an ssd as a secondary drive. This is much more the hacker spirit.
| Awesome. I'm sure it's just nostalgia, but I really miss the
| iBook / PowerBook lineup.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| I had one of these white plastic iBook G4s. My next laptop was
| the very first "unibody" MacBook Pro 15", bought from a
| Thanksgiving sale in 2008. I upgraded the RAM to 8GB and the HD
| to an SSD and it still runs great today. I stopped trying to
| upgrade the OS so the biggest challenge now is security.
| Thankfully Firefox has a long-term-stable version that still runs
| and gets current root certs for TLS.
| jawilson2 wrote:
| > I upgraded the RAM to 8GB and the HD to an SSD
|
| And you still meet the specs of the current Macbook 16 years
| later.
| pseudocomposer wrote:
| Until you start comparing the bandwidth/speed of that RAM and
| SSD, at least...
| _joel wrote:
| Indeed, you fill it up even quicker nowadays.
| speedgoose wrote:
| I don't know. The iBook G4 had DDR 333 MHz PC2700 at
| best. The modern SSD of a Macbook M3 is about twice as
| fast in GB/s (2.5GB/s vs 5GB/s). The latency is likely
| worse, but at the same time the M3 has much bigger L1 and
| L2 caches (192KB*8 vs 64KB, and 16MB vs 512KB).
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| If you think about how a lot of people use their Macbooks
| all they really need is a 13" iPhone. And the 15 Pro has 8
| GB of RAM.
| wpm wrote:
| I used OpenCore Legacy Patcher to put Monterey on my early 2009
| unibody (speed bump from the late 2008 model) and it runs
| alright still.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Those things are tanks. It really frustrates me that Apple
| stops updating the OS after 5 to 7 years.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| Linux runs great on them, at least.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| Just install a modern Linux, that's what I did with my 2012
| unibody MBP (which I'm typing this reply on).
| samtheprogram wrote:
| You'll either need to give up GPU acceleration on the
| unsupported upgrade to post-Mojave, or lose the Firefox support
| later this year on the next LTS. I'm not happy about it.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| I recently did a similar set of upgrades. I wanted to create a
| Mac OS 9 computer for my son. So, I bought three untested G4 Mac
| minis (Late 2005) after learning that there is now a version of
| Mac OS 9 that has been hacked to run on them:
|
| http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?board=127.0
|
| When they shipped they were Mac OS X only. They are actually,
| with this hack, some of the fastest machines you can get to run
| Mac OS 9.
|
| Anyway, I cleaned them, installed SSDs, changed the clock
| batteries, and maxed out the RAM on all three of them. I'm
| keeping the fastest 1.5 Ghz one for my son and the other two
| (1.25, 1.33) I thought I might keep as backups but I guess I'll
| just sell them on eBay since now I'm comfortable enough working
| in these that I think I could fix his pretty easily if anything
| went wrong.
| winrid wrote:
| What will your son do with OS9 learning games and such?
| WoodenChair wrote:
| Yes exactly and no Internet access.
| buildbot wrote:
| Ooff this is a lot of work vs. using an external firewire to sata
| enclosure - that's what I went with for my powermac G4. But very
| cool!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-04-01 23:02 UTC)