OWC SOLID STATE DRIVE TEST SOFTWARE MAC OS X
OWC SOLID STATE DRIVE TEST SOFTWARE MAC OS
OWC SOLID STATE DRIVE TEST SOFTWARE SERIAL
OWC SOLID STATE DRIVE TEST SOFTWARE PRO

(Note that from a cold start, the Mac spends some time testing memory and other system components, so startup is not just a factor of drive speed.) System startup was significantly faster – just 33 seconds, over 30% faster than the hard drive. The Legacy SSD was used in a miniStack enclosure, which was connected to a built-in FireWire 400 port. Startup time with the Deskstar drive on the 66 MBps ATA-5 bus was 48 seconds, and Xbench 1.3 turned in a result of 52.16 in its drive benchmark. In all cases, I booted the MDD from the drive to be tested and then shut down the Mac and rebooted. Big drives can be a problem on ATA-4 and ATA-5. The third drive bus is 33 MBps ATA-4 and is used by the optical drive(s). The second hard drive bus is 66 MBps ATA-5, which I used in several of these tests for convenience. The primary hard drive bus is 100 MBps ATA-6 and supports “big” hard drives – ones over 128 GB. Note that the MDD has three different drive busses. I have tested five different configurations and made some interesting discoveries. Testing with OS X 10.4īecause the MDD Power Mac is one of my production machines, I haven’t used it to test the SSD as extensively as I will with some of my other Macs. I also hope to test the drive with some G3 iMacs and my 1.25 GHz eMac.

OWC SOLID STATE DRIVE TEST SOFTWARE PRO

I hope to test the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD Legacy, the FireWire 800 card, the SATA card, and the SATA hard drive in a Beige G3, a Blue & White G3, and a dual 500 MHz Mystic Power Mac G4, and possibly some other legacy Macs as well.

OWC SOLID STATE DRIVE TEST SOFTWARE SERIAL

I also have some additional hardware to help me evaluate things: a Sonnet Tempo Serial ATA card, an SBA FireWire 800 card, and a NewerTech Voyager drive dock (with USB 2.0 and 3.0, FireWire 400 and 800, and eSATA) all on loan from Other World Computing, and a refurbished 500 GB 7200 rpm Samsung hard drive with a 16 GB cache that I bought for testing purposes. It has 2 GB of memory installed, along with a USB 2.0 card and three hard drives (one 80 GB Deskstar plus two 400 GB ones – one for work, one for backup). My Tiger machine is a dual 1 GHz G4, the last model capable of booting the Classic Mac OS.

OWC SOLID STATE DRIVE TEST SOFTWARE MAC OS

Once everything is clones, I can use the Legacy SSD in the external case or install it in any of a number of G3 and G4 Macs that accept a 3.5″ ATA drive.Īfter installing Tiger, I copied the System Folder and Applications (Mac OS 9) from my Classic partition to the SSD, rebooted the computer in Mac OS 9.2.2 from the internal drive, and made sure the System Folder on the SSD was “blessed” (Apple’s term). I installed the SSD in a NewerTech miniStack enclosure, which has USB 2.0 and FireWire 400, and I used SuperDuper to clone the internal hard drive to the SSD. (My standard drive in my dual 1 GHz Mirror Drive Door Power Mac G4 is a 400 GB 7200 rpm Deskstar with an 8 MB cache.)

OWC SOLID STATE DRIVE TEST SOFTWARE MAC OS X

Because this drive is smaller than the Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger boot partition that I normally use, I installed a basic Tiger install (fully updated to 10.4.11) on the SSD, one cloned from a 80 GB 7200 rpm Deskstar hard drive with a 2 MB cache. The drive itself is the SATA OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD plus a mounting bracket to fit a 3.5″ drive bay and an Addonics IDE-to-ATA adapter. The first one I’m testing is the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD Legacy Edition, a 40 GB drive. I received a couple of those legacy SSDs last week, and in coming weeks I’ll be busy putting them through their paces. At about the same time, Other World Computing (OWC) was preparing to address exactly that issue with a new line of “legacy” SSDs that would be plug-and-play compatible with the UltraATA bus in G3 and G4 Macs. Last December, I started a series on SSD (Solid State Drive) options for older Macs – see SATA and SSD Options for G3 and G4 Power Macs.

Owc solid state drive test software