Believe me, I've long known about the CF card solutions for vintage Macs. I researched quite a lot about them, in fact. I also kept a close eye on the dialogue here in this forum about ARTMIX Japan's CF card solution for the SE/30. But I had good reasons to purchase a turnkey solution (or at least, what I thought would be one) from OWC.
First, we all know that flash memory has a much more limited life compared to spinning platter hard drives. As such, OWC's 7% over provisioning is a definite plus over any CF card drive solution. OWC also advertises that there SSDs don't slow down over time like other flash memory solutions, and especially not like a CF card would. Defenders of CF cards will of course argue with me about this saying, "in the greater scheme of things those differences are marginal at best, and really don't matter that much." But to me, it matters.
The other reason I chose an OWC SSD, above and beyond their companies great reputation for quality SSD products, is the fact their 2.5 inch Legacy SSD drives are a drop in solution for old PowerBooks that don't require any mounting adapters or special add-on interfaces. Again, for some of you, that is meaningless and irrelevant. But for me, it has a lot of significance.
Yet another reason I chose OWC's Legacy SSD for my PowerBook G3 Wall Street was because I thought it would be faster overall than any CF card solution. And truly, if CF cards or SD cards were in fact faster, why then are true SSD drives selling so well? Why aren't more people just foregoing those drives and sticking an SD card in the side of their iMac and using that? Now some of you will try to argue that a true SSD drive is faster in "modern" Macs than a CF card or SD card, and that old vintage Macs have such slow drive interfaces that really doesn't matter which one you put into them. But in my opinion, such arguments are indeed true when it comes to a Macintosh Plus computer from 1987, but consider well that the word "vintage" covers a broad spectrum of Macs that were produced over many many years. As such, the interface in a Mac from the 80s is very different from the Mac in the later 90s, which also is very different from Macs in the 2000s.
Even if you don't accept any of my arguments, the fact is that others here in various threads have posted their benchmark results from CF card solutions in various old Macs. So I want to purchase an OWC SSD so I could run benchmarks on it and then publish my results for everyone to see once and for all which is faster (in a PowerBook G3 Wallstreet II, anyway). Sadly, OWC screwed up royally on their IDE interface for their Legacy SSDs, and as a result I never could get it to work so that I could run benchmarks on it. That part still dsappoints and disgusts me.
And so, I still have my two PowerBook WallStreet computers, but neither one of them have an SSD in them. But should one of you out there ever come across a true SSD 2.5 inch drives that works perfectly in an old PowerBook G3, be sure to post back here and let us know!
First, we all know that flash memory has a much more limited life compared to spinning platter hard drives. As such, OWC's 7% over provisioning is a definite plus over any CF card drive solution. OWC also advertises that there SSDs don't slow down over time like other flash memory solutions, and especially not like a CF card would. Defenders of CF cards will of course argue with me about this saying, "in the greater scheme of things those differences are marginal at best, and really don't matter that much." But to me, it matters.
The other reason I chose an OWC SSD, above and beyond their companies great reputation for quality SSD products, is the fact their 2.5 inch Legacy SSD drives are a drop in solution for old PowerBooks that don't require any mounting adapters or special add-on interfaces. Again, for some of you, that is meaningless and irrelevant. But for me, it has a lot of significance.
Yet another reason I chose OWC's Legacy SSD for my PowerBook G3 Wall Street was because I thought it would be faster overall than any CF card solution. And truly, if CF cards or SD cards were in fact faster, why then are true SSD drives selling so well? Why aren't more people just foregoing those drives and sticking an SD card in the side of their iMac and using that? Now some of you will try to argue that a true SSD drive is faster in "modern" Macs than a CF card or SD card, and that old vintage Macs have such slow drive interfaces that really doesn't matter which one you put into them. But in my opinion, such arguments are indeed true when it comes to a Macintosh Plus computer from 1987, but consider well that the word "vintage" covers a broad spectrum of Macs that were produced over many many years. As such, the interface in a Mac from the 80s is very different from the Mac in the later 90s, which also is very different from Macs in the 2000s.
Even if you don't accept any of my arguments, the fact is that others here in various threads have posted their benchmark results from CF card solutions in various old Macs. So I want to purchase an OWC SSD so I could run benchmarks on it and then publish my results for everyone to see once and for all which is faster (in a PowerBook G3 Wallstreet II, anyway). Sadly, OWC screwed up royally on their IDE interface for their Legacy SSDs, and as a result I never could get it to work so that I could run benchmarks on it. That part still dsappoints and disgusts me.
And so, I still have my two PowerBook WallStreet computers, but neither one of them have an SSD in them. But should one of you out there ever come across a true SSD 2.5 inch drives that works perfectly in an old PowerBook G3, be sure to post back here and let us know!