With all the modern flash style devices out there and rapidly evolving, what would be the best option for me with a Quadra 800 running OS 8.1? Would I even notice an improvement from my spinning platter drive, or a 15,000rpm enterprise drive with adapter?
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Quadra SCSI drive replacement options
- Thread starter danaeckel
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I don't think you'll notice an improvement over one of the old high performance SCSI drives. SCSI emulation tends to be pretty slow. The best I know of is SCSI2SD v6. Which will probably saturate the SCSI BUS and might outdo the old high performance SCSI drives in IOPS.
As for straight sustained transfer. I think the built in SCSI BUS will be the limiting factor with either option. Isn't it limited to 5MB/s? You need something like an FWB Jackhammer NuBUS card to really unlock the performance of those drives.
I had that card in a 7100/66AV. I remember the hard drive was insanely loud. But going from a 230MB regular SCSI to a Fast and Wide 2GB and FWB Jackhammer was a major boost.
As for straight sustained transfer. I think the built in SCSI BUS will be the limiting factor with either option. Isn't it limited to 5MB/s? You need something like an FWB Jackhammer NuBUS card to really unlock the performance of those drives.
I had that card in a 7100/66AV. I remember the hard drive was insanely loud. But going from a 230MB regular SCSI to a Fast and Wide 2GB and FWB Jackhammer was a major boost.
While not a direct equivalent to your Quadra 800, I recently replaced an 8Gb Maxtor IDE drive in my P630CD with an IDE-CF adaptor with 8GB CF card. Both running 8.1.
The difference was not night and day by any means, but notable even so. Boot time dropped from 50 seconds to 30, and the system is both more responsive and also runs far more smoothly, even though I would not say it is 'faster' in a measurable sense. It does however feel faster, due to the improved responsiveness.
The primary difference in performance between solid state and spinning drives is really down to the difference in seek times. Even the fastest drives take time to read the directory structure, locate the correct track and read the data as the platter spins, while even the slowest solid state device, with no mechanical parts, reduces data recovery time markedly.
Even when limited by the bandwidth of the interface, that improvement alone will help system performance in use.
I'd also add that I have a SCSI2SD V5.5 (much slower than v6, I think more similar to cheaper ones like bluescsi). I used it to get multiple old Macs tested and first booted. As it is an external version.
Anyways, I also got a stack of *new* 20 year old high performance SCSI drives (80 pin). Which I've installed in my IIvx, IIcx and II. In the IIcx and II. There really isn't a difference between the high performance drives and SCSI2SD. My IIvx, however, has a Daystar 040 33Mhz accelerator. It is noticeably faster with the high performance SCSI than the SCSI2SD. I wish I had a v6 to test but don't.
At least it was faster with the 040 card. Those things are too valuable, rare and old to leave plugged in. Not much difference with the regular 030 CPU.
Anyways, I also got a stack of *new* 20 year old high performance SCSI drives (80 pin). Which I've installed in my IIvx, IIcx and II. In the IIcx and II. There really isn't a difference between the high performance drives and SCSI2SD. My IIvx, however, has a Daystar 040 33Mhz accelerator. It is noticeably faster with the high performance SCSI than the SCSI2SD. I wish I had a v6 to test but don't.
At least it was faster with the 040 card. Those things are too valuable, rare and old to leave plugged in. Not much difference with the regular 030 CPU.
My Beige G3 I just replaced my IDE-133 card with a SATA card that was flashed to work with a mac, and replaced the spinning Maxtor DMA-6 drive with SSD, and wow the improvement. Anyone who has a PCI based mac this is a fairly inexpensive upgrade and recommended.
I may have a Beige G3 to try something similar - by the time system performance in general reaches this sort of level, solid state storage really does tend to make a difference!