What a coincidence that the KingSpec drive uses the same chips I decided on. If I had to guess, the only reason it's slower is due to it only having one NAND chip installed, whereas my drive has 4 (for 256GB). Also, the SATA/mSATA SSDs all have DRAM cache on them, which makes the random tests way faster (hence the much higher scores). Unfortunately the SM2236 doesn't support DRAM cache, so I couldn't implement that in my design. That red SATA to IDE adapter you're using is special, in that instead of the garbage JMicron JM20330 SATA-IDE bridge IC that all the other adapters use, it uses a Marvell 88SA8040 or 88SA8052, which are WAY better, and faster in most cases (as shown here). At the end of the day, though, the native IDE drives like mine, the KingSpec, and IDE DOM will be compatible with a much wider array of systems than ANY SATA to IDE adapter. Lastly, you are correct in that that Sonnet PCI-X card is not bootable. I did have a plan to attempt to write my own firmware for it to make it bootable, which I may start working on sometime soon.
That's correct! The Kingspec drive is slower because all data is stored in one nand flash chip (with a limited IOPS). Just for data recovery purposes the Kingspec has more chances to a successful data recovery compared to your design because the controller stores the data in the flash chips like a RAID controller (a pain in the ass reconstruct the integrity of the data by hand).
Its likely the CF adapter didn't enable UDMA Mode on the CF card (the commonly available Syba ones do). Those Transend cards should be performing faster. The difference between the DOS Dude card and the Kingspec is likely because the DOS Dude card has more flash chips and the controller is spreading the writes between them, giving a slight speed boost.
Not sure. He doen't show the actual result in MB/sec only the score (why btw?) - but it is only a "133x" CF card - which could in theory read up to 20MB/sec. In reality i would say more like 12-13MB/sec. Which is slow for todays standard. But the CF specification goes up to 160MB/sec (1066x). Thus could have competeted with the native IDE drives. Edit: Same is of course also true for the SD Card. I think he used a UHS-I.... while there is UHS-III stuff floating around.
CF cards have always been slow when used as a HDD standin, beyond DMA etc related things. I no longer recall the exact technical reason but it has to do with the layout and addressing that is part of the way CF works, even the fastest cards are slow at bursts of small ops compared to an old IDE HDD per my testing. Sustained data transfer is fast, but seek etc is absolutely not. I tested this extensively but quite a few years ago, also VS a CF microdrive which behaves like any HDD. It's not interface, CF is IDE pretty much, and behaves the same.
It all makes pretty good sense. The DOSDude card has 4 flash chips vs 1, allowing the controler chip to spread out the read/writes, making it faster. The SATA SSDs all have RAM caches, which dramatically accelerate access to the flash.
The Startech SATA to IDE adapter is what is essentially required for replacing an OG Xbox hard drive with an SSD. There are, of course, lots of other similar adapters, many of which are cheaper. But the Startech adapter works. At least in that application, and the Xbox is extremely picky. None of the others I had work. It just speaks to that adapter being a solid choice. It worked for you. It works in OG Xboxes. It will probably work for others. Great video!
Probably something with the available drivers. After all, the og Xbox is just a Pentium 3 and Geforce 3 running Windows 2000, Microsoft went with common PC parts on purpose. Makes me wonder if it is possible to add support for other adapters to the system.
Great video! Also totally not surprised by how well the Startech SATA to IDE adapter performs. It's a total champ. I've used the Startech in iMac G3s, Original Xboxs and even an Amiga 4000. It's fast and largely super compatible.
I kept only the old Machines we used at home ourselfs, nobody needs trash. Why keep it ? Nerdy issues, nostalgia of non social people ? Why junk trash museums in mums house ? I only repair them for creative people, FatBoy Junky XL slim people that need gear, hating simulating it. I see no need for this, why a channel for nostalgia ? all my Macromedia Flash developing, i did on these Alienware Fake Plastic apple machines, the worst apple ever ? But the company kept hem, good enough...We he loves that ?
The one place it didn’t work for me is in a multitrack digital audio recorder. It didn’t do well in simultaneous read and write at that data rate and I got a lot of drive speed faults, it kept kicking out of record. I “upgraded” to a two inch 24 track analogue machine and have had great success, though I did have learn editing using a razor blade.
Could the difference in speed between the DosDude and KingSpec SSDs be simply because your DosDude SSD has 256GB in 4 flash chips, vs 64GB in a single chip for the KingSpec? I reckon if you tested a 128GB or 256GB Kingspec its speed might be very similar.
Main reason for dosdude’s SSD being faster than KingSpec is due to capacity, more precisely - number of NAND modules. For example, if you’ll get two regular SATA SSDs, let’s say 128GB capacity, but one of them is made from one 128GB NAND and the other one is made out of two 64GB NANDs, the 2x64GB will be faster. Not by much, but it will be. That’s similar to the RAID 0 way of working. If you use two or more drives, speed increases. Same principle goes inside the drive itself. More NANDs equals more speed. Simple yet amazing.
I'm not surprised the DODDude's drive beat out the Kingspec. The controller will spread out the data across as many chips as possible so it will read/write to them in parallel making them faster. I *am* surprised the performance gap was not bigger.
This is so great. I'm hoping to feature a DosDude drive in an upcoming video about a VAIO laptop with IDE. It looks super impressive. Thank you for doing this benchmarking- exceptionally helpful! Also, very jealous of that microscope (starts saving pennies).
Loved your video, but I'm afraid you're wrong about the results (Chinese IDE vs. DosDude's card): The chinese IDE has a single NAND chip while DOSDUDE card has 4, and the read/write NAND is spread across all the available NAND's, so yes, DOSDUDE is faster, but if you would buy a 256GB chinese IDE SSD with 4 NAND chips, you'll get approx. the same results. Keep up those great videos!
The best MSATA to IDE adapter you'll find is the Ableconn IIDE-MSAT. It uses the Marvell 88SA8052 chipset. I've bought countless of the Chinese MSATA to IDE clones and they all fail. The extra cost for the reliability and performance of the Ableconn adapter is worth the price. The current retail price of $42 USD for Albeconn + $35 Kingston KC600 256GB, make it comparable in price to dosdude's pre-assembled 256GB. Plus the Albeconn is reusable in the future as the MSATA SSD wears out.
You're going to have to do a lot of computing on that device to have it wear out. I haven't had that issue and I have had some of my SSDs since they first started making them and I have yet to have one actually fail which is actually kind of lucky for me.
I would assume dosdude1s ssd ran faster as it has more nand flash chips than the kingspec which would allow the controller to write to more disks at once. The larger flash chips might also help as they may have a larger buffer in them. Kind of surprised the sata adaptors are so much faster. I guess the ide drives have an older controller.
Most SATA SSDs come with an SDRAM cache which the controller Dosdude1 used does not support. That's probably the reason the SATA disks are faster, especially in random benchmarks.
Great video as always. The only thing I think you could have done better is to also bench test a normal 2.5/3.5" IDE drive to compare it against all the flash replacements.
My experience using sata to ide converters is whether or not they work depends a great deal on the sata device connected to it. Some drives just don't work properly using old ide compatibility modes. Older drives seem more reliable with newer ones ignoring compatibility with old controllers. Apacer sata ssd modules seem pretty good and they are small enough to fit with a ide44 converter into a 2.5" drive bay
I wish I'd heard of DOSDude's solution when I did an HDD replacement on my 1999 Dell laptop. As it is, it's rocking a CF card in an IDE caddy and that's working fairly well. But an inexpensive native-IDE solution would've been the bomb.
Even in my Amiga 600 I notice a slight improvement from CF card adapter to SD card adapter, but the integrated IDE controller is pretty much maxed out at this point.
Yes.On the Amiga 600 and 1200, it is necessary to use an external controller on the accelerator and the built-in one is obsolete in data transfer speed.Although there are improvements to the controller that allows you to speed up work, but it is still difficult for him to compete with modern solutions. I also have an Amiga 1200 as a retro computer. You can put a Morph OS on the Power MAC hardware and run amiga applications.
Not sure if they still stock them, but suppliers like Digikey and Mouser used to carry industrial PATA SSDs. They were not cheap, and for what I needed, it wasn't clear from the datasheets if they supported ATA versions old enough for my need, which was why I never ended ordering any.
Great Video. Ah the good old KingSpec SSD. I used one in two videos (on a 2003 Notebook and an Apple TV) and they are very very slow (although I might have an older version). I really need to get the DosDude1 SSD :)
I’ve been using the Startech sata to ide adapters all over the place. It’s great to see that they deliver the best performance. They’ve worked wonders with my old ide only PC’s.
This reminded me of those last agp cards that were actually pci express but had a chip that "converted" to agp on the card itself (on the opposite side of the chipset). I just wish people would stop using CFcard thinking it's ssd. CFcard is not SSD, they are slow, they have an absurdly lower number of reads and writes in the long term, they were made to be used as a pendrive and not for an operating system to write to it multiple times. They last a lot less, and are a lot more expensive. Those industrial flash ide modules are also cfcard technology, and are only designed to be read many times (not written), not only are they expensive, they will only last a few years in a retro gamer machine.
sorry thats not true. CF Cards were developed for mobile devices like PDAs, Cameras and small form factor laptops. CF first of all is an interface - thus says nothing about the storage technology. For example IBM produced a hard drive in CF Card form factor. CF Cards were most of the time NOR-Flash, later NAND-Flash. Those ARE Solid State Drives. You are drawing a line into the sand where no line is. The main difference between modern NVMe or MSATA drives compared to the CF Cards are the controller. They got more sophisticated caching stuff in DRAM to avoid writing on the Flash to often, mapping the physical storage to spread out write operations, having more capacity and swapping those around - again to reduce write operations on a single Gate. But from the flash perspective there is no huge difference between a SD Card, CF Card or NVMe drive. Also i disagree, you COULD use a CF Card for a gaming system, but you should avoid using those as a swap device or disable writing logfiles on those drives. Having a DOS PC with a CF Card is absolutly fine - the few created Save games does not matter.
I wish it was possible to slide in the Transcend PATA IDE SSD into those tests. I've hunted for a teardown, but I don't see one online. The main draw of the Transcend PATA IDE SSD was that they listed a firmware level wear leveling onboard as well as options for TRIM (OS depending) as other neat features. I'm curious if that SSD uses the same controller chip as the DOSDUDE board as well, and if it's integrated into the firmware of the chip, or if it's custom flashed. I have a Transcend 128GB drive, so I may crack it open to get some pics of the internals, as it's more expensive than the King something-or-other brand.
I've seen these IDE flash modules before. They are supposed to be just plugged directly into the port on the board, no cable needed. So only one drive, and expensive. And while both IDE SSDs have the same chips, they use different amount of memory chips. And just as with SATA SSDs, more chips means more controller-to-memory bandwidth. That is also the reason why SSDs of the same model but different sizes give different speeds.
those Silicon Motion controllers have a number of channels and without looking that one up I would guess it has 4 (usually theyre even numbers, 4, 8, whatever) and so my guess is that perf diff is in part due to the parallel (no pun intended) nature of the flash being accessed...im surprised though that it matters as I assumed the bottleneck would have been the interface - i guess that shows what a HUGE difference having a RAM cache makes on these as that wouldve leveled the playing field is my guess regardless of number of channels for most workloads anyway
Thanks for doing this comparison, you saved me a lot of money on testing these myself! I always wondered how the DoM SSD would compare to SATA to IDE adapter.
Man, that Powermac you used for testing is gorgeous! Powermacs of that vintage are fairly rare here in my country. But I do have the first gen iMac G5! Sadly the mobo is gonesky due to a bunch of caps spewing their guts all over it.
These are some very, very interesting results that I will be keeping in mind for my IDE shenanigans on all future computers. Many of the industrial PCs I've picked up are IDE only with limited expansion and its nice to know there are options to make them as snappy as possible! Thanks you for benchmarking these! I have one of those cheap 2.5in" PATA to SATA and will consider switching to Dosdude1's awesome SSD. (think Allen Bradley 1700M, 17" touch screen industrial PC with his SSD.)
Many years ago I used a Compact Flash to laptop IDE adapter with an ancient ThinkPad. It worked, but was amazingly slow. I also seem to recall I also got a CF adapter for one of the old iPods.
The Kingspec PCB certainly is designed much more nicely, I like the two stacks of memory chips (well it has the solder points for them) rather than one back to back across.
Even today as a 29yr old i still have it on my list of things to do too build a normal pc inside a G4Tower case as it looks kinda easy to adapt. making my 12yr old dream mac like pc build
It's nice seeing retro hardware tested scientifically rather than anecdotally. I doubt anyone would have expected that little Startech adaptor to beat the generic PCI SATA card going in to this.
This was a great video man, I use a lot of different disk solutions myself and having a set of benchmarks like this is actually pretty helpful. I have a startech adapter i was going to put in a windows 98 build and it's good to see it's a solid performer..... I just wish I could get a few of those dos dude ssd's for my my Amigas...
The SM2236 chip is a compactflash card controller. The Dosdude and the Amazon special drives are essentially CF cards, just using modern flash devices, which is why they kill the speed of the CF card. But from a compatibility perspective there should be no difference between a CF card and those two drives. As for speed differences between them that's due to the number of flash chips. You often see this in specs, where lower capacity drives have lower speeds. It's all about parallelism which is lost if you have fewer flash devices.
This video is a valuable resource. I have an MDD G4 Dual 1.2GHz. I just replaced the aging HDD with a NOS WD 80GB HDD. I need to upgrade to an SSD and put Sorbet Leopard on it. Need some time to do it.
2.5" sata Hewlet-Packard 654540-001 adapter sleds are very good 2.5" SSD mounts as they preserve 3.5" sata connector physical locations, bolt into mac pro 1,1 and above apple sleds
That small SATA adapter looks perfect, since most sata SSDs are smaller inside, we can probably make 3D printable shells that can fit both the adapter and the SATA ssd in the right spot. Or just put some kapton tape on them and let them sit loose in older laptops.
I actually bought a 64GB KingSpec PATA SSD back in 2016 for my Thinkpad T23, and it was only storage in that laptop until 2021 when I added an UltraBay HDD caddy and an SD-to-PATA adapter for storing more stuff. That KingSpec drive is still running my 98SE install and works great. The only concern is budget. It was definitely hard to swallow $50 on a 64GB SSD. Hopefully dosdude's creation will be more reasonable.
Much will depend on hiw much pcbway will charge fore delivering the cards pre populated ( unless you want to do the soldering yourseld) and how much the case and shipping costs.
The CF card says 133x on it. That speed rating is based on 1x equal to 150KB/s (based on compact disk read speed), so the card is advertising itself as being just shy of 20MB/s in ideal conditions, which is way below the 100MB/s speed of the IDE bus.
I was just looking at these! The price of the kingspec is pretty high considering how cheap M.2 adapters are. But it is good to see it’s actually what it says it is..
The difference in speed between the DOSDude drive and the KingSpec drive probably has more to do with the DOSDude drive having 4 flash chips vs. only one in the KingSpec. Most SSD controllers have multiple memory channels, and can access multiple flash chips in parallel. (The PCB quality in the KingSpec may also play a role.)
Came here to say the same thing! The controller will write data across all the chips it has access to, so write times will definitely be better on dosdude's drive.
@@FinalManaTrigger and read times as well i suppose, wouldn't having multiple flash chips om a multi cannel controller be allmost the same as having sevaral IDE drives in a jbod ( ofc without the seek time on flash and possible lipitations on top and soeed due to not using multiple ide channkes on a dedicated ide raid controller and thus being limited byba single udebus)
I'd been looking at these lately and wondering myself. Thanks for the vid man, you're a totally underrated channel, been lurking and watching since you put your floppy raid vid out.
I wonder if the KingSpec only having 1 memory module vs DOSDUDE's having 4 is part of the cause of the speed difference. I know that can affect NVMe SSDs. Just look at the stories from the recent Macbook releases. A test of KingSpec's 256GB SSD might had shown a different result.
Yeah that was my first thought as well. SSDs with multiple flash chips can use striping, i.e. parallelizing reads and writes to improve performance. It's why SSDs with less storage capacity tend to be slower than the same model with higher capacity.
@@ActionRetro The controller is 4 channel, so with 4 flash chips, it will perform better than with 1 - typical of SATA SSD controllers as well, so the 120/128 GB model will usually be slower. With 64GB flash chips, a 64 will be single channel, a 128 dual channel, a 256 quad channel and a 512 two chips per channel, with the 1TB moving up the chip capacity by 4x and going to 4 chip again
On the DOSdude vs. KingSpec - the DOSdude uses four 64 MB chips, while the KingSpec only uses one. Many SSD controllers run much faster when they have more chips to parallelize across. Just look at the speed reduction for Apple M2 Minis/MacBooks with the lowest-GB drive vs. the next one up. Because the lowest-GB drives always have half as many chips.
Isn't the PCI slot gonna bottleneck this whole thing? EDIT: ooooooooo,, PCI-X card EDIT2: yep, it won x) Too bad it's not bootable. I wonder if there are any bootable ones out there? Or firmware hacks?
I bought a cheap no-name IDE to SD card adapter for my Gigabit Ethernet G4 and it boots OS 9.2.2 in 36 seconds and boots OS X 10.4.11 in 20 seconds. And for 10 bucks and the 128GB SD card I just had lying around I’d say that’s a pretty good value. As for the dosdude drive it also has more chips and I’d imagine the controller chip is running them in a sort of Raid0 type setup.
Love the t-shirt! :D You seem to use the style of presentation I like, that "quasi bumbling" style also used by Technology Connections and Aging Wheels. Just a bit more camera shy. Subscribed! :)
I'd definitely like to see benchmark figures for classic hard drives roughly the same size! Most likely even the CF card would be faster than most late-90s/early-2000s hard drives.
Probably, especially on random reeds and writes, thus us wgerecssds ( or any soldid state storrahe) beats spinning rust hands down, due to not needeing ro move the heads berween tracks and wait for thevrelevant data to come by on the next rotation.
I would be interested to see an SSD replacement that went the other direction. Not to be the fastest possible IDE drive but to be slow as balls. More specifically to better emulate the speed of an actual old hard drive maybe even having it be adjustable. Things like platter rotation and delays on seek time like even with its paltry speed the CF card will still feel way faster than the original hard drives in old macs because it has almost no seek time.
Buy why, I don't think anuone would have minded the new upgraded disk access times when these systems where new, but sadly the tech wasn 'r there yet. But hay I might be missing something
Thing is, the marvel based ide to sata adapters are quite good, there are even variations for ODD support on slave via jumper. Anyway, the cheap solution with adapter and standard quality sata ssd will outperform any other solution, especially if the ssd isn't total garbage and has proper dram for block mapping and slc for burst writes. Add to that, modern ssds own internal garbage collection and wear leveling routines which don't even need some OS flags to start them, it will be long time before that combo will fail or become inadequate slow.
PATA to SATA adapter and then normal SATA SSD still seems like the cleanest solution - IF the target computer is okay with it. You're currently not going to find anything that is cheaper than SATA SSDs. And it's easy to swap them into a modern system to prepare the drive.
the difference between the dosdude drive and the Amazon special is that data can be spread across 4 chips on dosdude's drive, while the Amazon special only has 1 chip. Having multiple memory chips increases performance.
I believe that the reason the DOSDUDE drive is so much faster than the KingSpec is because it is populated with 4 NAND chips while the KingSpec only has one. In effect it is like running a 4 way RAID system set to span 4 drives. You are able to access the throughput of each drive at the same time rather than being constrained to the throughput of a single drive and as such the DOSDUDE drive is hitting its limit with the controller chip rather than the NAND chips. In day to day use this limitation would not be much of a factor as it is unlikely that a file you wish to access had been split between all 4 NAND chips but it is something that definately would show up on a benchmark. It could be interesting to see what the DOSDUDE drive could do with an upgraded controller but that is way past my abilities.
I’ve heard that most SATA SSD’s can be disassembled, and the actual SSD inside is smaller then the housing. What I’d say the best thing to do might be, for a laptop, is to just disassemble a SATA SSD and use an adapter to make it fit inside the laptop.
I was given a G3 "Pismo" PowerBook with an internal fault that prevents it from recognising internal drives. But in my collection of "stuff" is a CF-FireWire 400 card reader. I installed Tiger on a 32 GB CF card and OS 9.2.2 on a 1 GB CF card. Both cards can boot this laptop although each has to be ejected then reinserted into the card reader before attempting bootup.
Thanks for this video. I've never been a fan - nor regular user - of Apple-Macs, but found this very interesting, as I have a couple of old PC's and Laptops which are IDE, but can no longer get IDE hard drives here in the UK; either 2.5 inch, or 3.5 inch. I may well invest in a couple of these IDE/SSD drives. I do have a couple of IDE-SATA converters, but they aren't suitable for use in my Laptops.
I've upgraded my car's entertainment system (2010 BMW CIC) from spinning disk to ssd. Based on recommendations, I used a Marvell based IDE->mSATA adapter (Kuroutoshikou branded). It works fine, and according to The Internet, the others don't work with this system. So I would recommend if you want to use anbd mSATA adapter, to find a Marvell based one. Also, I wonder if the open source one works on the BMW CIC system, but since I have a working setup I don't think I will try it our.
This is quite interesting. If I'm understanding this right, a SATA drive would be faster even with an adapter for translation. While I was not aware of the DosDude offering, I've been considering the KingSpec vs the very IDE / SATA adapter that came in 2nd, with a Crucial MX500, for a Celeron 325 machine my friend's kid picked up for $15 (he's still learning). I would have two questions. First, is that adapter suitable for boot / OS drive use, and second, would I see the same differences across these devices on a Windows PC? Without the technical know-how and skill, the DosDude solution is only feasible for me if I can get one ready-made for a comparable price, which may not be feasible for its creator.
Another good solution would be to unhook your IDE based computer, pack it relatively well, and take it to your local recycling center. Then use the money you planned to spend on a IDE/SATA converter, and use it to buy yourself a modern pc.
I see that the Amazon drive only has one memory-chip. This is also a speed limiting factor. The controller can make use of parallel read- and write-actions to multiple chips, allowing for higher speeds.
one more thing, you can probably ask dos dude to upgrade your kingspec to 4 times the size by installing those missing nand memory and it also might get faster just by doing that
If someone sold something like this, in an old IDE HD case, with the motor etc connected to the activity light somehow so it still chonks and clunks when being read, they'd sell a shit ton.
Hello and thanks for this useful channel. I need some help and I know I can find good advices here... Here's the plot : I have a beautiful PM G4 AGP 400 Mhz I have upgraded to 1.5 Go of ram and with 128 Go SSD. It runs X Tiger (10.3) and works fine. I use it to digitize my old tapes (MiniDV) with iMovie driving the camcorder via Firewire connection. Here's my problem : transferring my (raw) footages of several gigabytes can take 2 or 3 hours, may be more for a whole "cassette". The idea is to work my files on another Mac, a M1 Mini which is powerful enough for this kind of stuff. So, I'd like to know what is the best solution, according to you, to transfer my "tapes" on an external drive that would be fast enough for the G4 (Firewire I guess) and I could later plug into my Mini. Thanks in advance for the help. NB: I don't want to use an analogic gear a la El Gato, I want the numeric flux from my camcorder (a Sony PC101).
12:21 - the performance difference is not that surprising IMHO; the DosDude drive has multiple memory channels filled with chips whereas the KingSpec drive only had the one. It was more a surprise that the IDE bus was fast enough for the difference to be noticeable!
Very off the wall question, but what is that dual fan PCI slot thing inside? Is it a 3D printed setup or something off the shelf available for purchase? I've been looking for more or less the exact same thing for a few older computers I've been working with lately.
What a coincidence that the KingSpec drive uses the same chips I decided on. If I had to guess, the only reason it's slower is due to it only having one NAND chip installed, whereas my drive has 4 (for 256GB). Also, the SATA/mSATA SSDs all have DRAM cache on them, which makes the random tests way faster (hence the much higher scores). Unfortunately the SM2236 doesn't support DRAM cache, so I couldn't implement that in my design. That red SATA to IDE adapter you're using is special, in that instead of the garbage JMicron JM20330 SATA-IDE bridge IC that all the other adapters use, it uses a Marvell 88SA8040 or 88SA8052, which are WAY better, and faster in most cases (as shown here). At the end of the day, though, the native IDE drives like mine, the KingSpec, and IDE DOM will be compatible with a much wider array of systems than ANY SATA to IDE adapter.
Lastly, you are correct in that that Sonnet PCI-X card is not bootable. I did have a plan to attempt to write my own firmware for it to make it bootable, which I may start working on sometime soon.
You're a legend mate! The work you do is totally epic!
That's correct! The Kingspec drive is slower because all data is stored in one nand flash chip (with a limited IOPS). Just for data recovery purposes the Kingspec has more chances to a successful data recovery compared to your design because the controller stores the data in the flash chips like a RAID controller (a pain in the ass reconstruct the integrity of the data by hand).
yup
Thanks for developing these SSDs!
Rockstar!
Its likely the CF adapter didn't enable UDMA Mode on the CF card (the commonly available Syba ones do). Those Transend cards should be performing faster. The difference between the DOS Dude card and the Kingspec is likely because the DOS Dude card has more flash chips and the controller is spreading the writes between them, giving a slight speed boost.
Not sure. He doen't show the actual result in MB/sec only the score (why btw?) - but it is only a "133x" CF card - which could in theory read up to 20MB/sec. In reality i would say more like 12-13MB/sec. Which is slow for todays standard. But the CF specification goes up to 160MB/sec (1066x). Thus could have competeted with the native IDE drives.
Edit: Same is of course also true for the SD Card. I think he used a UHS-I.... while there is UHS-III stuff floating around.
the SD card would've been as limited if it didn't use UDMA and it did much better. CF cards are just obsolete.
I can tell you that that model of CF card is that slow. I have 8GB version of it.
CF cards have always been slow when used as a HDD standin, beyond DMA etc related things. I no longer recall the exact technical reason but it has to do with the layout and addressing that is part of the way CF works, even the fastest cards are slow at bursts of small ops compared to an old IDE HDD per my testing. Sustained data transfer is fast, but seek etc is absolutely not. I tested this extensively but quite a few years ago, also VS a CF microdrive which behaves like any HDD. It's not interface, CF is IDE pretty much, and behaves the same.
It is indeed a CF controller chip
It all makes pretty good sense.
The DOSDude card has 4 flash chips vs 1, allowing the controler chip to spread out the read/writes, making it faster.
The SATA SSDs all have RAM caches, which dramatically accelerate access to the flash.
He needs a big Recycling bin in his mums house ! E WAIST !
only keep the apple II, trash the rest, keeping the M2 as the daily gear !
@@lucasRem-ku6eb take your nonsense comments elsewhere
@@armanelgtron4533 You need the Roland MC 80 ? why you need it, not smart enough ? what did you meant ?
The Startech SATA to IDE adapter is what is essentially required for replacing an OG Xbox hard drive with an SSD. There are, of course, lots of other similar adapters, many of which are cheaper. But the Startech adapter works. At least in that application, and the Xbox is extremely picky. None of the others I had work. It just speaks to that adapter being a solid choice. It worked for you. It works in OG Xboxes. It will probably work for others. Great video!
Probably something with the available drivers. After all, the og Xbox is just a Pentium 3 and Geforce 3 running Windows 2000, Microsoft went with common PC parts on purpose. Makes me wonder if it is possible to add support for other adapters to the system.
Great video! Also totally not surprised by how well the Startech SATA to IDE adapter performs. It's a total champ. I've used the Startech in iMac G3s, Original Xboxs and even an Amiga 4000. It's fast and largely super compatible.
I kept only the old Machines we used at home ourselfs, nobody needs trash.
Why keep it ? Nerdy issues, nostalgia of non social people ? Why junk trash museums in mums house ?
I only repair them for creative people, FatBoy Junky XL slim people that need gear, hating simulating it. I see no need for this, why a channel for nostalgia ?
all my Macromedia Flash developing, i did on these Alienware Fake Plastic apple machines, the worst apple ever ? But the company kept hem, good enough...We he loves that ?
It is actually surprising how good StarTech does those kind of things. Always expensive, almost never cheap :D lol
The one place it didn’t work for me is in a multitrack digital audio recorder. It didn’t do well in simultaneous read and write at that data rate and I got a lot of drive speed faults, it kept kicking out of record. I “upgraded” to a two inch 24 track analogue machine and have had great success, though I did have learn editing using a razor blade.
Could the difference in speed between the DosDude and KingSpec SSDs be simply because your DosDude SSD has 256GB in 4 flash chips, vs 64GB in a single chip for the KingSpec? I reckon if you tested a 128GB or 256GB Kingspec its speed might be very similar.
Right you are.
yeah the controller manages the multiple chips in a somewhat parallel fashion
@@AlpineTheHusky parallel or interleaved ?
Yeah dosdude admits this in the pinned comment at the top. More is almost always better...
Main reason for dosdude’s SSD being faster than KingSpec is due to capacity, more precisely - number of NAND modules.
For example, if you’ll get two regular SATA SSDs, let’s say 128GB capacity, but one of them is made from one 128GB NAND and the other one is made out of two 64GB NANDs, the 2x64GB will be faster. Not by much, but it will be. That’s similar to the RAID 0 way of working. If you use two or more drives, speed increases. Same principle goes inside the drive itself. More NANDs equals more speed.
Simple yet amazing.
I'm not surprised the DODDude's drive beat out the Kingspec. The controller will spread out the data across as many chips as possible so it will read/write to them in parallel making them faster. I *am* surprised the performance gap was not bigger.
Interleaved.
This is so great. I'm hoping to feature a DosDude drive in an upcoming video about a VAIO laptop with IDE. It looks super impressive. Thank you for doing this benchmarking- exceptionally helpful!
Also, very jealous of that microscope (starts saving pennies).
Loved your video, but I'm afraid you're wrong about the results (Chinese IDE vs. DosDude's card): The chinese IDE has a single NAND chip while DOSDUDE card has 4, and the read/write NAND is spread across all the available NAND's, so yes, DOSDUDE is faster, but if you would buy a 256GB chinese IDE SSD with 4 NAND chips, you'll get approx. the same results.
Keep up those great videos!
Sebastian's unmistakable presence haunts this video in the first few seconds, when the drives falls over.
The best MSATA to IDE adapter you'll find is the Ableconn IIDE-MSAT. It uses the Marvell 88SA8052 chipset. I've bought countless of the Chinese MSATA to IDE clones and they all fail. The extra cost for the reliability and performance of the Ableconn adapter is worth the price. The current retail price of $42 USD for Albeconn + $35 Kingston KC600 256GB, make it comparable in price to dosdude's pre-assembled 256GB. Plus the Albeconn is reusable in the future as the MSATA SSD wears out.
You're going to have to do a lot of computing on that device to have it wear out. I haven't had that issue and I have had some of my SSDs since they first started making them and I have yet to have one actually fail which is actually kind of lucky for me.
I would assume dosdude1s ssd ran faster as it has more nand flash chips than the kingspec which would allow the controller to write to more disks at once. The larger flash chips might also help as they may have a larger buffer in them.
Kind of surprised the sata adaptors are so much faster. I guess the ide drives have an older controller.
Most SATA SSDs come with an SDRAM cache which the controller Dosdude1 used does not support. That's probably the reason the SATA disks are faster, especially in random benchmarks.
@@nilswegner2881 fair but does a cashe effect raw throughout larger than the cashe?
Great video as always. The only thing I think you could have done better is to also bench test a normal 2.5/3.5" IDE drive to compare it against all the flash replacements.
Don't forget to do a nice low star count video review of the Kingspec SSD on the website from which you purchased it.
Big fan of those "pricey" StarTech SATA to IDE adapters, glad to see that they're worth the money!
My experience using sata to ide converters is whether or not they work depends a great deal on the sata device connected to it. Some drives just don't work properly using old ide compatibility modes. Older drives seem more reliable with newer ones ignoring compatibility with old controllers. Apacer sata ssd modules seem pretty good and they are small enough to fit with a ide44 converter into a 2.5" drive bay
I wish I'd heard of DOSDude's solution when I did an HDD replacement on my 1999 Dell laptop. As it is, it's rocking a CF card in an IDE caddy and that's working fairly well. But an inexpensive native-IDE solution would've been the bomb.
Even in my Amiga 600 I notice a slight improvement from CF card adapter to SD card adapter, but the integrated IDE controller is pretty much maxed out at this point.
Yes.On the Amiga 600 and 1200, it is necessary to use an external controller on the accelerator and the built-in one is obsolete in data transfer speed.Although there are improvements to the controller that allows you to speed up work, but it is still difficult for him to compete with modern solutions. I also have an Amiga 1200 as a retro computer. You can put a Morph OS on the Power MAC hardware and run amiga applications.
Not sure if they still stock them, but suppliers like Digikey and Mouser used to carry industrial PATA SSDs. They were not cheap, and for what I needed, it wasn't clear from the datasheets if they supported ATA versions old enough for my need, which was why I never ended ordering any.
Great Video. Ah the good old KingSpec SSD. I used one in two videos (on a 2003 Notebook and an Apple TV) and they are very very slow (although I might have an older version). I really need to get the DosDude1 SSD :)
I’ve been using the Startech sata to ide adapters all over the place. It’s great to see that they deliver the best performance. They’ve worked wonders with my old ide only PC’s.
This reminded me of those last agp cards that were actually pci express but had a chip that "converted" to agp on the card itself (on the opposite side of the chipset).
I just wish people would stop using CFcard thinking it's ssd. CFcard is not SSD, they are slow, they have an absurdly lower number of reads and writes in the long term, they were made to be used as a pendrive and not for an operating system to write to it multiple times. They last a lot less, and are a lot more expensive. Those industrial flash ide modules are also cfcard technology, and are only designed to be read many times (not written), not only are they expensive, they will only last a few years in a retro gamer machine.
sorry thats not true. CF Cards were developed for mobile devices like PDAs, Cameras and small form factor laptops. CF first of all is an interface - thus says nothing about the storage technology. For example IBM produced a hard drive in CF Card form factor. CF Cards were most of the time NOR-Flash, later NAND-Flash. Those ARE Solid State Drives. You are drawing a line into the sand where no line is. The main difference between modern NVMe or MSATA drives compared to the CF Cards are the controller. They got more sophisticated caching stuff in DRAM to avoid writing on the Flash to often, mapping the physical storage to spread out write operations, having more capacity and swapping those around - again to reduce write operations on a single Gate. But from the flash perspective there is no huge difference between a SD Card, CF Card or NVMe drive. Also i disagree, you COULD use a CF Card for a gaming system, but you should avoid using those as a swap device or disable writing logfiles on those drives. Having a DOS PC with a CF Card is absolutly fine - the few created Save games does not matter.
I wish it was possible to slide in the Transcend PATA IDE SSD into those tests.
I've hunted for a teardown, but I don't see one online.
The main draw of the Transcend PATA IDE SSD was that they listed a firmware level wear leveling onboard as well as options for TRIM (OS depending) as other neat features.
I'm curious if that SSD uses the same controller chip as the DOSDUDE board as well, and if it's integrated into the firmware of the chip, or if it's custom flashed.
I have a Transcend 128GB drive, so I may crack it open to get some pics of the internals, as it's more expensive than the King something-or-other brand.
I've seen these IDE flash modules before. They are supposed to be just plugged directly into the port on the board, no cable needed. So only one drive, and expensive.
And while both IDE SSDs have the same chips, they use different amount of memory chips. And just as with SATA SSDs, more chips means more controller-to-memory bandwidth. That is also the reason why SSDs of the same model but different sizes give different speeds.
17:22
LTT screwdriver moment
those Silicon Motion controllers have a number of channels and without looking that one up I would guess it has 4 (usually theyre even numbers, 4, 8, whatever) and so my guess is that perf diff is in part due to the parallel (no pun intended) nature of the flash being accessed...im surprised though that it matters as I assumed the bottleneck would have been the interface - i guess that shows what a HUGE difference having a RAM cache makes on these as that wouldve leveled the playing field is my guess regardless of number of channels for most workloads anyway
Thanks for doing this comparison, you saved me a lot of money on testing these myself! I always wondered how the DoM SSD would compare to SATA to IDE adapter.
You can get mSATA to regular SATA adapters so try that then convert to IDE or PATA or whatever. Not the best solution but hay.
Man, that Powermac you used for testing is gorgeous! Powermacs of that vintage are fairly rare here in my country. But I do have the first gen iMac G5! Sadly the mobo is gonesky due to a bunch of caps spewing their guts all over it.
The best party of my Saturday morning is watching what new project you've been working on.
These are some very, very interesting results that I will be keeping in mind for my IDE shenanigans on all future computers. Many of the industrial PCs I've picked up are IDE only with limited expansion and its nice to know there are options to make them as snappy as possible!
Thanks you for benchmarking these! I have one of those cheap 2.5in" PATA to SATA and will consider switching to Dosdude1's awesome SSD. (think Allen Bradley 1700M, 17" touch screen industrial PC with his SSD.)
Many years ago I used a Compact Flash to laptop IDE adapter with an ancient ThinkPad. It worked, but was amazingly slow. I also seem to recall I also got a CF adapter for one of the old iPods.
The Kingspec PCB certainly is designed much more nicely, I like the two stacks of memory chips (well it has the solder points for them) rather than one back to back across.
Even today as a 29yr old i still have it on my list of things to do too build a normal pc inside a G4Tower case as it looks kinda easy to adapt.
making my 12yr old dream mac like pc build
It's nice seeing retro hardware tested scientifically rather than anecdotally. I doubt anyone would have expected that little Startech adaptor to beat the generic PCI SATA card going in to this.
This was a great video man, I use a lot of different disk solutions myself and having a set of benchmarks like this is actually pretty helpful. I have a startech adapter i was going to put in a windows 98 build and it's good to see it's a solid performer..... I just wish I could get a few of those dos dude ssd's for my my Amigas...
The SM2236 chip is a compactflash card controller. The Dosdude and the Amazon special drives are essentially CF cards, just using modern flash devices, which is why they kill the speed of the CF card. But from a compatibility perspective there should be no difference between a CF card and those two drives.
As for speed differences between them that's due to the number of flash chips. You often see this in specs, where lower capacity drives have lower speeds. It's all about parallelism which is lost if you have fewer flash devices.
This video is a valuable resource. I have an MDD G4 Dual 1.2GHz. I just replaced the aging HDD with a NOS WD 80GB HDD. I need to upgrade to an SSD and put Sorbet Leopard on it. Need some time to do it.
I experimented with this too. IDE to sata converter with an SSD boots faster over that IDE port than over a PCI sata card. A lot faster...
2.5" sata Hewlet-Packard 654540-001 adapter sleds are very good 2.5" SSD mounts as they preserve 3.5" sata connector physical locations, bolt into mac pro 1,1 and above apple sleds
That small SATA adapter looks perfect, since most sata SSDs are smaller inside, we can probably make 3D printable shells that can fit both the adapter and the SATA ssd in the right spot.
Or just put some kapton tape on them and let them sit loose in older laptops.
I actually bought a 64GB KingSpec PATA SSD back in 2016 for my Thinkpad T23, and it was only storage in that laptop until 2021 when I added an UltraBay HDD caddy and an SD-to-PATA adapter for storing more stuff. That KingSpec drive is still running my 98SE install and works great. The only concern is budget. It was definitely hard to swallow $50 on a 64GB SSD. Hopefully dosdude's creation will be more reasonable.
Much will depend on hiw much pcbway will charge fore delivering the cards pre populated ( unless you want to do the soldering yourseld) and how much the case and shipping costs.
You have the best energy when talking about this stuff. "I'm looking at you-" haha. Rock on.
Have you ever tried opening up SATA SSDs? The PCB might be small enough to fit it and an adapter into a 3d-printed, 2.5" drive-shaped package.
New viewer. This was very interesting. I'd have liked a baseline benchmark with a spinning HDD, but still super useful. Thank you!
The CF card says 133x on it. That speed rating is based on 1x equal to 150KB/s (based on compact disk read speed), so the card is advertising itself as being just shy of 20MB/s in ideal conditions, which is way below the 100MB/s speed of the IDE bus.
I was just looking at these! The price of the kingspec is pretty high considering how cheap M.2 adapters are. But it is good to see it’s actually what it says it is..
The difference in speed between the DOSDude drive and the KingSpec drive probably has more to do with the DOSDude drive having 4 flash chips vs. only one in the KingSpec. Most SSD controllers have multiple memory channels, and can access multiple flash chips in parallel. (The PCB quality in the KingSpec may also play a role.)
Came here to say the same thing! The controller will write data across all the chips it has access to, so write times will definitely be better on dosdude's drive.
@@FinalManaTrigger and read times as well i suppose, wouldn't having multiple flash chips om a multi cannel controller be allmost the same as having sevaral IDE drives in a jbod ( ofc without the seek time on flash and possible lipitations on top and soeed due to not using multiple ide channkes on a dedicated ide raid controller and thus being limited byba single udebus)
I'd been looking at these lately and wondering myself. Thanks for the vid man, you're a totally underrated channel, been lurking and watching since you put your floppy raid vid out.
I wonder if the KingSpec only having 1 memory module vs DOSDUDE's having 4 is part of the cause of the speed difference. I know that can affect NVMe SSDs. Just look at the stories from the recent Macbook releases. A test of KingSpec's 256GB SSD might had shown a different result.
Oh interesting, I didn't know that could affect speed
Yeah that was my first thought as well. SSDs with multiple flash chips can use striping, i.e. parallelizing reads and writes to improve performance. It's why SSDs with less storage capacity tend to be slower than the same model with higher capacity.
This can also be seen in the M2 Macbook Air, it has fewer memory chips, and the disk IO is slower bc of that
@@ActionRetro The controller is 4 channel, so with 4 flash chips, it will perform better than with 1 - typical of SATA SSD controllers as well, so the 120/128 GB model will usually be slower.
With 64GB flash chips, a 64 will be single channel, a 128 dual channel, a 256 quad channel and a 512 two chips per channel, with the 1TB moving up the chip capacity by 4x and going to 4 chip again
On the DOSdude vs. KingSpec - the DOSdude uses four 64 MB chips, while the KingSpec only uses one. Many SSD controllers run much faster when they have more chips to parallelize across. Just look at the speed reduction for Apple M2 Minis/MacBooks with the lowest-GB drive vs. the next one up. Because the lowest-GB drives always have half as many chips.
He could do a slight redesign on that case by including a set of pegs in it so that he could fasten the board in place when they are snapped together.
Isn't the PCI slot gonna bottleneck this whole thing?
EDIT: ooooooooo,, PCI-X card
EDIT2: yep, it won x) Too bad it's not bootable. I wonder if there are any bootable ones out there? Or firmware hacks?
I bought a cheap no-name IDE to SD card adapter for my Gigabit Ethernet G4 and it boots OS 9.2.2 in 36 seconds and boots OS X 10.4.11 in 20 seconds. And for 10 bucks and the 128GB SD card I just had lying around I’d say that’s a pretty good value.
As for the dosdude drive it also has more chips and I’d imagine the controller chip is running them in a sort of Raid0 type setup.
Love the t-shirt! :D
You seem to use the style of presentation I like, that "quasi bumbling" style also used by Technology Connections and Aging Wheels. Just a bit more camera shy. Subscribed! :)
That upgraded G4 must ♬ Fly Like a G6. Like a G6. ♬
The Startech Adapter is great. The only adapter that managed to get a SSD working in my original Xbox.
My first SSD (circa 2009ish) was KingSpec branded. It failed rather quickly. But boy did it give me a taste for the speed benefits of an SSD.
I'd definitely like to see benchmark figures for classic hard drives roughly the same size! Most likely even the CF card would be faster than most late-90s/early-2000s hard drives.
Probably, especially on random reeds and writes, thus us wgerecssds ( or any soldid state storrahe) beats spinning rust hands down, due to not needeing ro move the heads berween tracks and wait for thevrelevant data to come by on the next rotation.
I would be interested to see an SSD replacement that went the other direction. Not to be the fastest possible IDE drive but to be slow as balls. More specifically to better emulate the speed of an actual old hard drive maybe even having it be adjustable. Things like platter rotation and delays on seek time like even with its paltry speed the CF card will still feel way faster than the original hard drives in old macs because it has almost no seek time.
Buy why, I don't think anuone would have minded the new upgraded disk access times when these systems where new, but sadly the tech wasn 'r there yet. But hay I might be missing something
Thing is, the marvel based ide to sata adapters are quite good, there are even variations for ODD support on slave via jumper. Anyway, the cheap solution with adapter and standard quality sata ssd will outperform any other solution, especially if the ssd isn't total garbage and has proper dram for block mapping and slc for burst writes. Add to that, modern ssds own internal garbage collection and wear leveling routines which don't even need some OS flags to start them, it will be long time before that combo will fail or become inadequate slow.
How do they compare against IDE and SATA mechanical drives?
PATA to SATA adapter and then normal SATA SSD still seems like the cleanest solution - IF the target computer is okay with it. You're currently not going to find anything that is cheaper than SATA SSDs. And it's easy to swap them into a modern system to prepare the drive.
the difference between the dosdude drive and the Amazon special is that data can be spread across 4 chips on dosdude's drive, while the Amazon special only has 1 chip. Having multiple memory chips increases performance.
I believe that the reason the DOSDUDE drive is so much faster than the KingSpec is because it is populated with 4 NAND chips while the KingSpec only has one. In effect it is like running a 4 way RAID system set to span 4 drives. You are able to access the throughput of each drive at the same time rather than being constrained to the throughput of a single drive and as such the DOSDUDE drive is hitting its limit with the controller chip rather than the NAND chips. In day to day use this limitation would not be much of a factor as it is unlikely that a file you wish to access had been split between all 4 NAND chips but it is something that definately would show up on a benchmark. It could be interesting to see what the DOSDUDE drive could do with an upgraded controller but that is way past my abilities.
That Startech ide to sata converter is the same one I use in my modded original Xbox - very much recommended for that application
I’ve heard that most SATA SSD’s can be disassembled, and the actual SSD inside is smaller then the housing. What I’d say the best thing to do might be, for a laptop, is to just disassemble a SATA SSD and use an adapter to make it fit inside the laptop.
I was given a G3 "Pismo" PowerBook with an internal fault that prevents it from recognising internal drives. But in my collection of "stuff" is a CF-FireWire 400 card reader. I installed Tiger on a 32 GB CF card and OS 9.2.2 on a 1 GB CF card. Both cards can boot this laptop although each has to be ejected then reinserted into the card reader before attempting bootup.
I watched DosDude build one. He made it look so easy😯
Thanks for this video. I've never been a fan - nor regular user - of Apple-Macs, but found this very interesting, as I have a couple of old PC's and Laptops which are IDE, but can no longer get IDE hard drives here in the UK; either 2.5 inch, or 3.5 inch. I may well invest in a couple of these IDE/SSD drives. I do have a couple of IDE-SATA converters, but they aren't suitable for use in my Laptops.
It was a while ago, but I did put an IDE SSD into a G4 Mac Mini. It worked decently
Well I guessed wrong, quite surprised by that.
I can understand the high price now, that's an extremely niche product.
That Sonnet card in all of that 64-bit PCI goodness. 64-bit PCI and all of it's speeds might be moden EISA.
I've upgraded my car's entertainment system (2010 BMW CIC) from spinning disk to ssd. Based on recommendations, I used a Marvell based IDE->mSATA adapter (Kuroutoshikou branded). It works fine, and according to The Internet, the others don't work with this system.
So I would recommend if you want to use anbd mSATA adapter, to find a Marvell based one.
Also, I wonder if the open source one works on the BMW CIC system, but since I have a working setup I don't think I will try it our.
i use that same startech adapter in both my OG xbox and ps2. i found that the startech IDE adapters are the most reliable.
Thank you for running these tests
This is quite interesting. If I'm understanding this right, a SATA drive would be faster even with an adapter for translation. While I was not aware of the DosDude offering, I've been considering the KingSpec vs the very IDE / SATA adapter that came in 2nd, with a Crucial MX500, for a Celeron 325 machine my friend's kid picked up for $15 (he's still learning). I would have two questions. First, is that adapter suitable for boot / OS drive use, and second, would I see the same differences across these devices on a Windows PC? Without the technical know-how and skill, the DosDude solution is only feasible for me if I can get one ready-made for a comparable price, which may not be feasible for its creator.
Another good solution would be to unhook your IDE based computer, pack it relatively well, and take it to your local recycling center. Then use the money you planned to spend on a IDE/SATA converter, and use it to buy yourself a modern pc.
While I enjoy all of you videos, this one has to be the most useful for me thus far.
I see that the Amazon drive only has one memory-chip. This is also a speed limiting factor. The controller can make use of parallel read- and write-actions to multiple chips, allowing for higher speeds.
Good job DOS Dude!
i wonder what is the manufacturing date and if it is only expensive because it was stocked on amazon 10 years ago
one more thing, you can probably ask dos dude to upgrade your kingspec to 4 times the size by installing those missing nand memory and it also might get faster just by doing that
14:00 What do these scores even represent?
"It got a score of 279.44... uhhh... units!"
Totally love the new microscope ! Keep up the good work dude !
If someone sold something like this, in an old IDE HD case, with the motor etc connected to the activity light somehow so it still chonks and clunks when being read, they'd sell a shit ton.
I was pretty certain the startech adaptor was going to come out towards the top. Quality devices from that company.
dat cables!
I would love to know what the score of a standard IDE drive is as a baseline.
Hello and thanks for this useful channel. I need some help and I know I can find good advices here... Here's the plot : I have a beautiful PM G4 AGP 400 Mhz I have upgraded to 1.5 Go of ram and with 128 Go SSD. It runs X Tiger (10.3) and works fine. I use it to digitize my old tapes (MiniDV) with iMovie driving the camcorder via Firewire connection. Here's my problem : transferring my (raw) footages of several gigabytes can take 2 or 3 hours, may be more for a whole "cassette". The idea is to work my files on another Mac, a M1 Mini which is powerful enough for this kind of stuff. So, I'd like to know what is the best solution, according to you, to transfer my "tapes" on an external drive that would be fast enough for the G4 (Firewire I guess) and I could later plug into my Mini. Thanks in advance for the help.
NB: I don't want to use an analogic gear a la El Gato, I want the numeric flux from my camcorder (a Sony PC101).
12:21 - the performance difference is not that surprising IMHO; the DosDude drive has multiple memory channels filled with chips whereas the KingSpec drive only had the one. It was more a surprise that the IDE bus was fast enough for the difference to be noticeable!
What's the brand, and price, of the cheapo adapter that came in third? Did you make a video about it and I missed it?
The dosdude1 SSD might actually be a good fit for some of my old machines
I would think the Dosdude SSD was faster because it's striping across 4 memory chips, whereas the Kingspec is only running on 1 memory chip.
You need a KingSpec ATA Disk On Module (DOM) which goes right in the ATA connector.
Very off the wall question, but what is that dual fan PCI slot thing inside? Is it a 3D printed setup or something off the shelf available for purchase? I've been looking for more or less the exact same thing for a few older computers I've been working with lately.
Between you and Steve, I suddenly feel better about my basement tech hoard.
Excellent work and video! It would be cool to compare the performance VS price. Thanks for sharing
i have that same G4 great machine really fast love it.. i do have a different screen then yours but no big deal