SOLID STATE DRIVE NEWS
Western-Digital joins the SSD scene with marketing muscle in 2010 with it's Blue Series of Flash based hard drives:
WD Silicon Edge Drive
Best Seller : 80GB Intel X-25 Mainstream
Recent Price Drop!
Great Performance
Indilinx Controller
Corsair Reactor SSD
Built-In USB 2.0 Port
On A Budget?
The Best Conventional Drive Technology
World's Fastest
Desktop Drive 3.5"
WD Velociraptor
Samsung F1 Series
FAST 'n BIG 1TB
2.5" WD Scorpio Black Series 7200RPM SATA
Computers Blogs
G5 iMac Cheap SATA SSD Disk Drive Upgrade
Mar/13/09 23:57 Filed in: Apple SSD
A 1st-generation Apple G5 1.6ghz iMac makes a good candidate for a Solid-State computer disk drive upgrade. As the original model - the lowliest and slowest of the iMac G5 family, Mine was beginning to show it's age. An upgrade from it's original 80gig SATA drive to a 250gig 7200rpm 8mb cache drive helped, but now with smaller capacity 30-64GB SSD disk prices hitting new bargain lows it deserves one last breath of new life.
These early generation G5 iMacs are a breeze to upgrade. 3 screws and pop off the back lid. A few more to remove and swap the SATA drive takes mere minutes. Finding an ICY DOCK MB882SP-1S 2.5" to 3.5" SSD & SATA Hard Drive Converter
to fit the 3.5" drive bay was easy enough, and barely cost $25 shipped using competitive priced 3rd-party sellers at Amazon
Taking advantage of OCZ's current SSD rebates - I found a dirt-cheap low-cost OCZ 30gig Solid Series SATA 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive
that cost $75 after rebate.
Granted, 30GB isn't much drive space these days, and the "Value priced" Solid Series from OCZ is only a respectable middle-of-the-road performer for an MLC SSD in 2009: 150mbps peak Reads, 90mbps Writes. For this backup Mac I keep on-hand, truly bleeding edge SSD speed doesn't matter. And is well matched to the SATA I controller chip of those iMacs anyways.
A clean OS X 10.4 Tiger install on an SSD takes much less disk space than 10.5 Leopard, and all I really need from this system is occasional access to web, email and Microsoft Office. It's also used a test-bench Mac for starting up other G3-G5 Macs in an emergency using FireWire target mode, remotely running disk diagnostics and system updates. An SSD and it's high read speeds is PERFECT for quickly running installers and applying updates.
Long story short, this cheap little bargain SSD drive UTTERLY REVITALIZED an aging Mac: Startup speed, app launching, and switching programs feels nothing short of amazing. It's still easy to push the old single G5 processor to 100% CPU utilization on some tasks, but at least now the drive is no longer the sluggish bottleneck it once was. Total project cost: About $100 - and well worth it.
These early generation G5 iMacs are a breeze to upgrade. 3 screws and pop off the back lid. A few more to remove and swap the SATA drive takes mere minutes. Finding an ICY DOCK MB882SP-1S 2.5" to 3.5" SSD & SATA Hard Drive Converter
to fit the 3.5" drive bay was easy enough, and barely cost $25 shipped using competitive priced 3rd-party sellers at AmazonTaking advantage of OCZ's current SSD rebates - I found a dirt-cheap low-cost OCZ 30gig Solid Series SATA 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive
that cost $75 after rebate.Granted, 30GB isn't much drive space these days, and the "Value priced" Solid Series from OCZ is only a respectable middle-of-the-road performer for an MLC SSD in 2009: 150mbps peak Reads, 90mbps Writes. For this backup Mac I keep on-hand, truly bleeding edge SSD speed doesn't matter. And is well matched to the SATA I controller chip of those iMacs anyways.
A clean OS X 10.4 Tiger install on an SSD takes much less disk space than 10.5 Leopard, and all I really need from this system is occasional access to web, email and Microsoft Office. It's also used a test-bench Mac for starting up other G3-G5 Macs in an emergency using FireWire target mode, remotely running disk diagnostics and system updates. An SSD and it's high read speeds is PERFECT for quickly running installers and applying updates.
Long story short, this cheap little bargain SSD drive UTTERLY REVITALIZED an aging Mac: Startup speed, app launching, and switching programs feels nothing short of amazing. It's still easy to push the old single G5 processor to 100% CPU utilization on some tasks, but at least now the drive is no longer the sluggish bottleneck it once was. Total project cost: About $100 - and well worth it.
