Thread
400Mhz Pismo
Interesting, if inapplicable (?) lowendmac Pismo ATA warning.
Here's the referenced Road Warrior article.
edit: PBG3 series + ATA6 = borked . . . :-/
. . . so I guess it was applicable after all. :
Here's the referenced Road Warrior article.
edit: PBG3 series + ATA6 = borked . . . :-/
. . . so I guess it was applicable after all. :
ATAPI is a software/command syntax protocol that uses IDE as the physical transport medium. Technically it wasn't even developed by the same industry consortium that maintained the IDE/ATA standards until the two merged with *ATA/ATAPI-4*. With the appropriate driver you can speak to ATAPI devices over any controller adhering to the ATA-2 standard or better. (And it *may* work over some vendor-specific "EIDE" variations that were coming out prior to the ATA-2 standard being ratified.) And that said... ATA-3 and ATA-2 are essentially the same thing. ATA-3 was a minor revision that added SMART as a "standard feature" and changed some implementation requirements to solve some reliability issues with faster transfer modes. It didn't add any new modes so a controller designed for ATA-2 could be trivially made to behave as an ATA-3 controller with little more than a BIOS tweak or driver change. 33MB/s UDMA modes are ATA-4.
The Lombard uses essentially the same drive controller as the Beige G3. ATA-3 wasn't ratified until 1997 so that controller was undoubtedly designed under the ATA-2 specifications, which might explain why whatever specs you're looking at call it that. (It's very possible that it doesn't strictly meet some "letter of the law" ATA-3 requirement with regards to physical implementation.) But being "ATA-2" doesn't prevent it from doing "ATA-3" things.
So I installed Linux Mint PPC. thanks so much for suggesting it. it runs better than OS X, gives me a modern OS and it runs very nicely. Now I just gotta wait till that 44-pin IDE -> LIF/ZIF adapter gets here. Then I will be rocking with Solid State.
Btw, the battery in this is all screwed up. After using it the first time and it lasted 3 hours, I charged it up and when I went to use it, it was at 4 lights for 5 minutes, then it instantly went to 1 blinking light and the machine shut off. I think there is a shorted cell. Before you ask, yes I did try Battery Reset 2.0. It didn't do a darn thing for it.
I got a BRAND NEW 6500mah battery going for it. The cells are brand new, not NOS. So that will be nice. I bought it on eBay, but it cost like $45 + $10 shipping, so kind of expensive. I am just building this up to be a relatively decked-out laptop. I am trying to reduce my vintage computing bulk by moving to laptops rather than desktops. the SCSI port on this came in handy, but I would rather have had FireWire on a Pismo (And the ATA-66MB/s would have helped too!)
Linux Mint runs very nice. I am typing this under it right now in IceWeasel. Took me a bit to figure out how to get my bookmarks to show up on the toolbar. But I got it.
Question: trying to get the one button mouse to simulate two buttons. Is there a modifier I press? I also would like to turn off the tap-to-click. It's annoying as hell having it register clicks when I barely put my finger on the trackpad. I have the plug in for the moue emulation, but i can't access the feature or tune it rather.
Thanks guys! the laptop is turning out nicely (oh and wifi has been upgraded to a D-Link DWL-G650 802.11g PC Card that does WPA2
) and it's plenty fast enough.
Btw, the battery in this is all screwed up. After using it the first time and it lasted 3 hours, I charged it up and when I went to use it, it was at 4 lights for 5 minutes, then it instantly went to 1 blinking light and the machine shut off. I think there is a shorted cell. Before you ask, yes I did try Battery Reset 2.0. It didn't do a darn thing for it.
I got a BRAND NEW 6500mah battery going for it. The cells are brand new, not NOS. So that will be nice. I bought it on eBay, but it cost like $45 + $10 shipping, so kind of expensive. I am just building this up to be a relatively decked-out laptop. I am trying to reduce my vintage computing bulk by moving to laptops rather than desktops. the SCSI port on this came in handy, but I would rather have had FireWire on a Pismo (And the ATA-66MB/s would have helped too!)
Linux Mint runs very nice. I am typing this under it right now in IceWeasel. Took me a bit to figure out how to get my bookmarks to show up on the toolbar. But I got it.
Question: trying to get the one button mouse to simulate two buttons. Is there a modifier I press? I also would like to turn off the tap-to-click. It's annoying as hell having it register clicks when I barely put my finger on the trackpad. I have the plug in for the moue emulation, but i can't access the feature or tune it rather.
Thanks guys! the laptop is turning out nicely (oh and wifi has been upgraded to a D-Link DWL-G650 802.11g PC Card that does WPA2
) and it's plenty fast enough.
Now that's just curious (and wrong). The laptop has a 16.6MB/s bus on it, yet the drive they put in runs faster that than. ATA/33 and the internal transfer rate of the drive is up to 20MB/s. Why would Apple put a bus in a system that is slower than the drive, when the ATA/33 Specs were out, and so was the G3 Blue and white which had it. Why wouldn't they migrate it over (remember, the B&W came out in 1998, and the Lombard came out in 1999). So why would apple wait so long (2000) before putting ATA/xx on the system.
what's even more tragic, is if I had gotten the Pismo, Apple made the jump from ATA-2 up to ATA-5, which is 66MB/s. That's like a 6x increase. Doesn't make sense... If I had gotten the Pismo, I could have rocked out with that SSD I am going to put in the system a bit better.
Also, is it right to get consistantly only 10MB/s on a 16.6MB/s bus? usually from overhead there is a loss, but I didn't think it would be THAT much of a loss.
It might be my drive though. I am going to throw the old 6GB back in, and see what I get (I will do a test) and it will be interesting if the ATA-5 of the drive is causing that.
what's even more tragic, is if I had gotten the Pismo, Apple made the jump from ATA-2 up to ATA-5, which is 66MB/s. That's like a 6x increase. Doesn't make sense... If I had gotten the Pismo, I could have rocked out with that SSD I am going to put in the system a bit better.
Also, is it right to get consistantly only 10MB/s on a 16.6MB/s bus? usually from overhead there is a loss, but I didn't think it would be THAT much of a loss.
It might be my drive though. I am going to throw the old 6GB back in, and see what I get (I will do a test) and it will be interesting if the ATA-5 of the drive is causing that.
How much cache is on the drive and what kind of test are you running?
I just looked up the specs sheet. It's an IBM Travelstar and the transfer rate (internally, platters) is higher than the interface. Which strikes me odd that apple would not even redesign/use a different IDE Controller.
After seeing a SMART error coming up while trying to load data onto the 20GB drive I have in the laptop, I decided to replace the drive. I found a 30GB in my stash, and when I went to format it, it says "Cannot Format - Locked" in Disk Utility... Weird...
What happened is the laptop I took it out of, the previous owner put a security password on the drive. Unfortunately, this means the laptop drive is useless unless you have the password...
Well, enter HDD Unlock This tool, for $5, I was able to brute-force the drive and cracked it. So now I have a 30GB HDD, and I am installing Mint PPC onto the drive. I can't get the old 20GB cloned over, so I have to completely reinstall. Oh well... I got time. I just hope the power doesn't go out in the middle (we have storms). And my battery is shot (after the initial run, the battery went to crap, I think a cell is shorted).
I got a brand new replacement battery coming. It cost $45 for it, and with a wifi card, USB 2.0 card, etc.. this will be a fully decked-out machine. it runs really nice under Mint with 512MB RAM. the DVD Decoder hasn't been used yet, but I am unsure if Linux can access it. It might so I will try it and see...
Anyways, if anyone has a locked drive, and they want the drive back (but not the data) that tool will work great. I think the max is $35 for up to 1TB. You purchase a 1 drive license to unlock one drive. You need Windows 2k/XP/Vista/7 to do it, and I would recommend using a tower. You can't use a FireWire or USB case as it won't pass the instructions to the chip for the ATA Lock command.
Anyways, glad I have a new drive. The 20GB is going to get taken apart for the rare earth magnets and probably used in one of my dad's projects.
What happened is the laptop I took it out of, the previous owner put a security password on the drive. Unfortunately, this means the laptop drive is useless unless you have the password...
Well, enter HDD Unlock This tool, for $5, I was able to brute-force the drive and cracked it. So now I have a 30GB HDD, and I am installing Mint PPC onto the drive. I can't get the old 20GB cloned over, so I have to completely reinstall. Oh well... I got time. I just hope the power doesn't go out in the middle (we have storms). And my battery is shot (after the initial run, the battery went to crap, I think a cell is shorted).
I got a brand new replacement battery coming. It cost $45 for it, and with a wifi card, USB 2.0 card, etc.. this will be a fully decked-out machine. it runs really nice under Mint with 512MB RAM. the DVD Decoder hasn't been used yet, but I am unsure if Linux can access it. It might so I will try it and see...
Anyways, if anyone has a locked drive, and they want the drive back (but not the data) that tool will work great. I think the max is $35 for up to 1TB. You purchase a 1 drive license to unlock one drive. You need Windows 2k/XP/Vista/7 to do it, and I would recommend using a tower. You can't use a FireWire or USB case as it won't pass the instructions to the chip for the ATA Lock command.
Anyways, glad I have a new drive. The 20GB is going to get taken apart for the rare earth magnets and probably used in one of my dad's projects.
Apple's PowerPC chipsets were always a day late and a dollar short compared to the competition. For all of PowerPC's positive attributes Apple's sheer laziness/incompetence in designing system chipsets was a constant monkey on the platform's back.
Apple used the same motherboard chipset, the one designed for the Beige G3, for three years, with only one minor tweak. (The "Heathrow" IC was replaced with "Paddington", the difference being 10mbit vs. 100mb Ethernet PHY support.) It had an ATA2 controller and no USB. (Apple gets all this credit for being an "innovator" in USB, but the first Macs with USB technically didn't have built-in support for it. They used an accessory PCI controller chip.) By comparison the early 1997 Intel PIIX3 southbridge was fully ATA3 compliant and included a USB controller (although early versions were buggy and it was often disabled.) And by 1998 Intel boards shipped with the ATA4/USB equipped PIIX4 (which by that time was usually paired with an AGP-capable Northbridge), which was an excellent chip. (It was so well supported that VMware/Virtualbox emulate it by default to this day.)
That was a tough time for Apple. In an attempt to achieve "feature parity" with standard PCs the B&W G3 shipped with an (initially buggy) accessory ATA4 controller and an "overclocked" PCI slot for video, which goes a lot to explain why it's a notoriously buggy and unreliable computer. Apparently Apple decided in the case of the Lombard they could afford to squeeze a USB controller onto what's essentially same motherboard as the "Wallstreet" but an ATA controller was too much. So they just went with the "Paddington" IDE and hoped no one would notice. The Lombard is really just a stopgap machine, just like the trayload iMacs, B&W G3, "Original" (non-AGP) iBook, and "Yikes" G4s were. The Pismo is technically the first "Jobsian"-era Mac laptop in terms of chipsets.
(Which of course is full of its own sadness, such as *never* developing a chipset supporting G4s with a DDR frontside bus.)
I am scratching the Solid-State drive idea. I just got the adapter, and it doesn't work with my SSD (btw, you should see the specs on that SSD in your NetBook Trash80) and when I ran tests using another adapter, the maximum I got for data transfer was 7MB/s
the minimum was 50KB/s So much for a solid-state drive. The 30GB IDE HDD I have in the Lombard right now was testing between 5MB/s up to 39MB/s
That's sad when a desktop drive outperforms an SSD. The SSD was made in 2009, the 30GB was made in 2004. That's pretty sad...
Anyways, due to the fact the adapter doesn't like my SSD (but will work with a LIF 30GB Hard drive) and the slow speeds, I am going to scratch the idea and stay with the 30GB.
my opinion Trash80, is to ditch that SSD and get a LIF hard drive. You will thank me when you see the speed increase.
the minimum was 50KB/s So much for a solid-state drive. The 30GB IDE HDD I have in the Lombard right now was testing between 5MB/s up to 39MB/s
That's sad when a desktop drive outperforms an SSD. The SSD was made in 2009, the 30GB was made in 2004. That's pretty sad...
Anyways, due to the fact the adapter doesn't like my SSD (but will work with a LIF 30GB Hard drive) and the slow speeds, I am going to scratch the idea and stay with the 30GB.
my opinion Trash80, is to ditch that SSD and get a LIF hard drive. You will thank me when you see the speed increase.
WTF be LIF? :?:
Classilla would indeed probably be happier under 10.3 than 10.2 because of the improvements in Classic for 10.3.
Which probably goes a long way toward explaining why "His Jobsness" was in such a hurry to prune all pre-Intel Macs from the X-Tree . . .
. . . maybe that (brilliant huckster) ID10T's Designer TEES have grown a bit too tight around his stiff neck!
How badly did he manage to bork the G5 series in terms of chipsets he no longer felt were worth supporting . . .
. . . after shilling every iPoo offering that came down the pike during his "second coming" as THE NeXT BIG THING!?
Trash,
LIF is an IDE drive usually intended for small netbooks and notebooks. It uses a small flat ribbon with exposed ends. If you open your netbook, you will see what I mean. It's that little 1" ribbon that goes between your motherboard and the Solid State drive. iPods with hard drives use the same connector. Physically they are ribbon cables, electronically they are just IDE drives. Also, they mostly run at 3.3v. So my IDE->LIF adapter has a step-down that takes the 5v input to the drive and down converts it to 3.3v. This is the reason why NetBooks get (among other advances) much better battery life if they use LIF. The iPod drives and other 1.8" (Definition of LIF drives) use the LIF/ZIF Connector. They also use a small plastic clamp-down device to hold the ribbon in, vs the pin setup on most IDE HDD. If you looked at my pics of the netbook, that white cable that goes from the board in my netbook to that Hitachi drive is LIF
LIF is an IDE drive usually intended for small netbooks and notebooks. It uses a small flat ribbon with exposed ends. If you open your netbook, you will see what I mean. It's that little 1" ribbon that goes between your motherboard and the Solid State drive. iPods with hard drives use the same connector. Physically they are ribbon cables, electronically they are just IDE drives. Also, they mostly run at 3.3v. So my IDE->LIF adapter has a step-down that takes the 5v input to the drive and down converts it to 3.3v. This is the reason why NetBooks get (among other advances) much better battery life if they use LIF. The iPod drives and other 1.8" (Definition of LIF drives) use the LIF/ZIF Connector. They also use a small plastic clamp-down device to hold the ribbon in, vs the pin setup on most IDE HDD. If you looked at my pics of the netbook, that white cable that goes from the board in my netbook to that Hitachi drive is LIF