Mac Daniel's Advice

SATA and SSD Options for PowerBooks and iBooks

Dan Knight - 2010.12.23 - Tip Jar

One of the best ways to speed up your Mac is with a bigger, faster hard drive (adding more system memory is the other), but there are less hard drives for PowerPC 'Books than before, and they tend to be lower in capacity than today's SATA drives.

In the world of computing, there are incremental, almost invisible changes, and there are significant, game changing ones.

For Mac users, one of those game changers was the move from more intelligent and more expensive SCSI hard drives to IDE* drives, which are electronically incompatible. All early PowerBooks used SCSI drives, and the PowerBook 150 (1994) marked the first time a PowerBook used IDE instead of SCSI. From then until Apple transitioned to Intel CPUs in 2006, all PowerBooks and iBooks would use IDE drives.



UPDATE: A reader let me know that Transcend makes 2.5" SSDs that use the IDE bus - and that's installed one in his WallStreet PowerBook, cutting boot time for Mac OS 8.6 in half. Drive sizes range from 2 to 128 GB. Prices are high in comparison to SATA SSDs. The company also makes IDE flash modules that connect to a standard 40-pin connector.


You Can't Swap IDE and SATA

Although there are bridge cards that will let you use a 3.5" SATA hard drive on a Mac with an IDE controller, the design of most notebook computers simply doesn't provide sufficient space to fit an adapter between a 2.5" SATA drive and and IDE cable. If you want to swap out your PowerBook or iBook IDE hard drive for a SATA one, you're out of luck.

Almost all SSDs are designed as swap-in replacements for 2.5" hard drives, which means that there's no way to use them as replacement drives in iBooks and PowerBooks.

Note that your maximum drive capacity depends on which version of the IDE bus and which version of the Mac OS you are running. Many older 'Books will not be able to see more than 128 GB, so there's no sense buying a larger drive for them. (See How Big a Hard Drive Can I Put in My iMac, eMac, Power Mac, PowerBook, or iBook? for more on the "big drive" issue.)

Why SSD?




Hard Drive Replacement

I don't know of any SATA-to-IDE adapter small enough to fit in a 2.5" drive bay along with a SATA hard drive or SSD. Crazy as it sounds, this may be one place where the old G3 PowerBooks with their device bays have options that later 'Books simply don't have.

Micro-ATA SSDs

The only option I can find for the internal hard drive slot is to use a Micro-ATA SSD with the appropriate adapter allowing it to interface with a notebook drive cable. And this isn't an inexpensive route to take - Lenovo drives start at $219 for 32 GB and go up from there.

This probably isn't an economically viable option. I mention it only as a possibility.

Compact Flash

Addonics makes a Compact Flash Hard Drive Adapter that holds one or two CF cards and can replace your 'Book's hard drive (see Silence Is Golden: Running Your Existing Notebook Using Flash Memory). You need to use a CF card that supports UDMA or you won't be able to boot from it. One problem here is that CF cards have a limited number of write cycles, so using them with Mac OS X, where virtual memory is always active, is asking for trouble.


Expansion Bay Modules


PC Cards

Another SSD option for G3 PowerBooks is a PC Card flash drive. Search for "ATA flash card" and see what you can find. Capacities go as high as 16 GB, but they are expensive.


Optical Drive Replacement




External Drive Options

Another alternative is to forget the whole idea of mounting a SATA drive or SSD inside your 'Book and go with an external drive, either FireWire or USB.



Although FireWire isn't nearly as fast as SATA, it's been built into most PowerBooks and iBooks since 2000. All you need is an external 2.5" FireWire enclosure that supports SATA.


The fastest G4 'Books have an ATA/100 bus, which is approximately equal to FireWire 800 in terms of throughput. Earlier FireWire models had ATA/66, which is two-thirds as fast - still a bit faster than FireWire 400.

SSDs keep getting faster, with the fastest rated at 360 MBps for reads, 275 MBps for writes. Converted to bits-per-second, which is how FireWire and USB are measured, that's 2.88 Gbps and 2.20 Gbps, which puts read speed past the 2.4 Gbps theoretical maximum of SATA 2.0. Other SSDs achieve speeds between 90 and 200 MBps (720 Mb/s to 1.6 Gbps).

Based on these numbers, most of today's SSDs will have no problem providing data over FireWire 800 or any slower protocol at the maximum speed the data bus allows. SATA 1.0 (1.2 Gbps) will be adequate for most current SSDs; the fastest SSDs may saturate SATA 2.0, USB 3.0 (3.3 Gbps maximum per device), and FireWire 3200 (3.2 Gbps); while SATA 3.0 (4.8 Gbps) is more than fast enough for any SSD available today.

In light of that, FireWire 400 may not seem like a realistic option. Then again, you have to look at what you're using right now. For a lot of us, that's a 4200 or 5400 rpm hard drive that can't provide data as fast as the bus can handle, so SSD (or a 7200 rpm IDE drive or a SATA drive) should have no trouble delivering data as fast as your 'Book can handle it.

If you are fortunate enough to have a 15" or 17" aluminum PowerBook, you have built-in FireWire 800, which is a completely viable alternative to using the internal drive bus. I'd say there are no drawbacks to going this route instead of using an internal SSD with the built-in drive bus, outside of the nuisance of using an external drive.

While an SSD on the internal ATA/100 bus - or even the older ATA/66 bus - would be faster, SSD on FireWire 400 will definitely give you some benefits over using an internal hard drive. (Another plus: Most older Macs don't support drives over 128 GB on the internal drive bus, a problem you won't have with an SSD or hard drive in a modern FireWire enclosure.)

That may not be an issue at today's SSD prices, where 240 GB SSD from OWC - the smallest one to fall in the "big drive" category - is going for over $500. That's a big investment to make in a legacy Mac, but prices will come down.

There are pros and cons with FireWire 400 for your SSD boot drive, but I think it is a viable (if not ideal) option.

USB 2.0

A lot of people don't realize that you can boot most G3 and later PowerPC Macs from USB. Although you can't select a USB drive as your startup drive in the operating system, most 'Book with built-in USB will boot from a USB drive if you hold down the Option key during startup and then select it as your boot volume.

Although USB 2.0 if officially rated at 480 Mbps, in the real world maximum throughput from a single device is 320 Mbps - and that's an unachievable goal for PowerPC Macs. Back in 2004, Bare Feats benchmarked the same drive using FireWire 800, FireWire 400, and USB 2.0 on three different Macs. Their finding: USB 2.0 was at best half as fast as FireWire 400. FW400 topped out at about 75% (38 Mbps) of its rated maximum speed, while USB 2.0 was on the order of 20% (64 Mbps).

You might do a bit better with an SSD and more recent version of OS X than Bare Feats used in 2004, but USB 2.0 is so slow relative to FireWire that I can't recommend it as your normal practice.

While you can boot from a USB 2.0 drive, at half the speed of FW400, I don't think you'd be happy with the results. This can be a great feature in a pinch, but not for everyday use.

As for those 'Books with USB 1.1 (all G3 iBooks and PowerBooks plus the Titanium G4 PowerBooks), don't even think about it. USB 2.0 is 40x as fast. With USB 1.1 you will be pulling out your hair.


These legacy workhorses are very affordable, often providing a lot more bang for your buck than a cheap Windows or Linux netbook. With a fast SATA drive - whether a regular hard drive, a hybrid drive, or an SSD - you can unleash even more of their potential.

A 'Book with maximum RAM and an SSD will take it well beyond its original performance, so if you have an iBook or PowerBook that you love and would like to use more, it's definitely worth considering. LEM

* Technically there are several standards and names for various versions of Parallel ATA - IDE, EIDE, ATA, Ultra ATA, etc. For the sake of simplicity, we use IDE in this article.



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