[gooser]

the hard drive on my g4 imac bit the dust and cost effective wise it seems that the best deal i can get is a kit that has a ssd and an ide/sata adapter with it. any conflicts running a ssd with os 9? thanks. the drive is 120gb.

[turtle777]

LOL, seriously ?

Wouldn't be drivers an issue ?

-t

[gooser]

i dunno. that's why i'm asking.

[gooser]

maybe i should clarify a little further. my g4 will run os 9 natively. i know that the later ones will not.

[reader50]

It *should* register as a block storage device like any other. And it's smaller than the 128 GB addressing limit, so no need to work around that if your G4 is affected.

The PATA -> SATA adapter is more likely to glitch up in my opinion. One I tried in my G4 years ago wasn't sleep compatible. Upon wakeup, it lost track of the attached drive. When the attached drive was the boot drive, this was very bad. Suggest getting the adapter from OWC to make sure it's tested and Mac-sleep compatible.

[Mike Wuerthele]

Now I want to try this.

[gooser]

owc is the one that's advertising this. and it's supposed to be compatible with some 1999 machines which was before os x came out. hmmmmmmmmmmm. i may start taking my imac apart. sure wanna feel confident i can put the thing back together before i order it.

[Mike Wuerthele]

Get some thermal paste. You'll need it at one point. You'll also need a T-10, T-8 and a T-6 Torx drivers, I think.

As disassemblies go, it's not super hard. You'll have to pull the motherboard out to get to the drive carriage, but if I remember correctly, its about five pretty large screws holding it in.

Its been a long time, but now I'm looking askance at the G4 iMac that's in the closet. Sure, the SSD would be limited to PATA speed (less than SATA 1), but the random access speed boost would be sweet.

[gooser]

this thing is nasty inside. real nasty. got it apart today, will start cleaning tomorrow.

[Mike Wuerthele]

And?

[gooser]

Originally Posted by Mike Wuerthele 

And?

strange you should ask this now. i just ordered the hard drive today. will be after christmas before i get back to it.

This may be off-topic, but for the last month I have been reading the title of this thread and I thought that it had always said

"os9 and sad's"

And so I was like "oh, he's having a problem with booting into OS 9 on an old Mac" *facepalm*

[gooser]

i've gotten the hard drive in but i haven't fooled with it because i just got a cube and i've been distracted with that. i can never finish one thing before i start on another. merry christmas everyone.

[shifuimam]

Sooo way to bump a year-old thread, I know, but just in case anyone is interested in this, I can verify that it does indeed work just fine. I got a superChina cheap mSATA-to-IDE adapter (the old miniPCI-e style connection, not the newer, much smaller M.2 form factor), stuck a 128GB SSD in it, and my PowerBook G4 had no problems with it. Sleep and hibernate (aka hybrid sleep) work, it's as fast as a drive can be on ATA-133, and it's completely silent (of course, but it's noticeable when you've been listening to a spinning hard drive for long enough).

I'm planning on putting an SSD in both my iMac G4 and my modded clamshell iBook. 64GB mSATA SSDs are cheap as hell now on eBay and elsewhere, and that's plenty of storage for OS 9 or even OS 9 and OS X (up through Tiger; Leopard is considerably heavier on disk consumption).

If you're planning on trying this, make sure you research your SSDs first. Some of the first inexpensive mSATA SSDs used in netbooks and cheap laptops have terribly slow eMMC controllers, to the point that even over an ATA-133 connection it's going to be unbearable.

Also: I realize that gooser was asking about OS 9 specifically. However, the hardware appears to the computer as a standard IDE hard drive, so there shouldn't be any problems except maybe a sleep issue (and that's only if the adapter has trouble powering back on after waking from sleep).