I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD | Hacker News Reader

I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD

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156 pointstodsacerdoti75 comments

This is not an easy task. For those of you that don’t know the iBook G4’s logic board and hard drive are essential hermetically sealed in the plastic case AND a second layer of metal. I ruined my first iBook G4 when attempting this same upgrade as the ribbon cables that connect the power button and LEDs ripped in half from age (very brittle). I bought another used iBook G4. It still has the stock 60 GB hard disk and now the slot-loading “Super Drive” is dead so I will have to fix it eventually If I want to keep using it. I actually bought a used PowerPC G4 MacBook Pro to use and these are WAY easier to work on, just a few screws and you have access to everything.

I will note to anyone reading this the €79 Amiga-like Morph OS is really good experience on these 32-bit single core PowerPC Macs, very snappy. I also installed Debian 12 Trixie using the Sid branch on my iBook G4 via the USB-A port and using guides (and links to files to get WiFi working) on the Mac Rumours forum I got it working perfectly. Using the Window Maker Window Manager it’s snappy and you get NeXTStep?OPENSTEP experience.

I hosed an iBook G4 repairing a hard drive back in the day. Oops

It is easily done. The IFIXIT guide mentions it for anyone interested.

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iBook+G4+12-Inch+800+MHz-1.2+GH...

"The connectors at the ends of the cables are attached very firmly to the sockets on the logic board. Pulling directly on the cable will either separate the cable from its connector or the socket from the logic board."

> the iBook G4’s logic board and hard drive are essential hermetically sealed in the plastic case AND a second layer of metal.

The CPU's heatsink is attached via adhesive. That is not "a hermetic seal."

Ouch!

I did the ssd upgrade to a G4 PowerBook* and it wasn't that dangerous. Nothing glued. Jut had some geek fun with 2 friends, all worrying about the tiny tiny screws and short and fragile cables.

If the iBooks are glued together, that's a totally different animal.

* unfortunately the GPU needs a reballing and without it the laptop only displays right in cold weather or for the first half an hour since power up :(

I did a LOT of work on my iBook back in the day. I never found it too challenging, maybe it was because it's how I learned.

Ah. So this is what Apple did to force you to buy their super expensive storage before custom drives and serialization.

I recently did a similar set of upgrades. I wanted to create a Mac OS 9 computer for my son. So, I bought three untested G4 Mac minis (Late 2005) after learning that there is now a version of Mac OS 9 that has been hacked to run on them:

http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?board=127.0

When they shipped they were Mac OS X only. They are actually, with this hack, some of the fastest machines you can get to run Mac OS 9.

Anyway, I cleaned them, installed SSDs, changed the clock batteries, and maxed out the RAM on all three of them. I'm keeping the fastest 1.5 Ghz one for my son and the other two (1.25, 1.33) I thought I might keep as backups but I guess I'll just sell them on eBay since now I'm comfortable enough working in these that I think I could fix his pretty easily if anything went wrong.

What will your son do with OS9 learning games and such?

Yes exactly and no Internet access.

Is there a large market for this?

you can just take any laptop and disable (or even remove) the wifi chip, so no. It's only done because people like to do nerd stuff. :)

Wow nice, I would be interested in one of those (preferably the 1.33) if you’d at all be willing to sell directly (and dependent on asking price). I’m in Vancouver BC, Canada.

Sorry, I would've but it's already on eBay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/126406855301

That one I unfortunately broke the plastic on while upgrading (pictures of that on eBay too).

The 1.25 Ghz one (1.25 Ghz G4, 120 GB Kingston SSD, 1 GB RAM, new clock battery) which is intact I have not listed yet. Feel free to contact me through X, email, etc. which you can find in my hacker news profile if you want to make an offer to buy that one directly.

Awesome, thanks for getting back to me. I just sent an email! :)

I maxed out my G4 Cube with an SSD, ATI card and a Sonnet Encore CPU to push it to 1.25Ghz — To this date still my most inspiring machine and just lovely for the occasional ReBirth session.

For the majority of readers who probably won’t know what that is, ReBirth was a soft synthesiser that was the precursor to Propellerheads Reason, one of the most famous DAWs.

Hey there are dozens of us out here still using rebirth. ;)

I thought he was referring to Final Fantasy

ReBirth was also notable for modeling its original functionality off of real hardware: two Roland 303s and an 808 (hence the full name ReBirth RB-338); they later added the 909. And if I recall, 808 sample patches were originally a community hack, but Propellerheads later embraced the concept (also for the 909), supporting audio patches along with GUI skins in later releases. I suspect this is part of what inspired the direction they took with Reason.

The G4 desktops are all pretty cool machines. One of these days I’d like to get ahold of a Quicksilver/MDD motherboard and see if I can figure out a way to fit it into a modern ATX case. The original tower cases were neat but not great in the airflow or noise departments, and with a growing number of G4 original PSUs failing it’s useful to be able to house a standard ATX PSU without case hacks.

> Tiger’s dd doesn’t have status=progress

Maybe sending it SIGINFO (^T in terminal) could help? Dunno if it's supported as far back as Tiger's.

(BSD thing, it's SIGUSR1 on GNU dd / Linux, the usability difference is that on darwin the terminal can conveniently send SIGINFO via ^T)

I believe it was!

I need to commit this to memory, I often forget to send stats=progress to dd. Thanks for the tip!

I think it is, but it does print an overall speed estimate at the end anyway. It's just not as conveniently formatted as `status=progress`, which gives you MB/sec (or GB/sec if appropriate), so you gotta do math to it.

Here's what the output at the end or from SIGINFO looks like (this is running on my Mac mini and copying from /dev/zero to /dev/null):

``` 148908277760 bytes transferred in 6.917856 secs (21525206330 bytes/sec) ```

If I add `status=progress`, then it _also_ prints this every second:

``` 150617456640 bytes (151 GB, 140 GiB) transferred 7.001s, 22 GB/s ```

> but it does print an overall speed estimate at the end anyway

Oh yeah, my point is that if there's no `status=progress` support or if someone forgot to add it then in-flight progress and speed can be displayed in a pinch, and that feature is not well known.

"Every second" is a `while sleep 1` + `kill -INFO` loop away.

A typical full output of it is:

    load: 2.91  cmd: dd 82396 running 0.02u 2.03s
    87770+0 records in
    87770+0 records out
    92033515520 bytes transferred in 2.149378 secs (42818673830 bytes/sec)

So if one uses `bs=1m` (which I frequently do, but always forget about status=progress) then records in/out will be in MiB.

Macs of that era are so beautiful...

I have an early 2003 12" PowerBook G4 with a 512 GB M.2 SSD. Setting up NetBSD with GRUB to work around <https://gnats.netbsd.org/22316>.

(The original hard drive is somewhere still; now I'm going to cover its hole, too!)

A friend of mine had one of these. It had a very nice keyboard, with curved keys and a sort of homey feel.

It's even edge-to-edge! Something that the current MacBook lineup doesn't feature.

Logitech Wave Keys remined me (slightly) of it.

I had one of these white plastic iBook G4s. My next laptop was the very first “unibody” MacBook Pro 15”, bought from a Thanksgiving sale in 2008. I upgraded the RAM to 8GB and the HD to an SSD and it still runs great today. I stopped trying to upgrade the OS so the biggest challenge now is security. Thankfully Firefox has a long-term-stable version that still runs and gets current root certs for TLS.

> I upgraded the RAM to 8GB and the HD to an SSD

And you still meet the specs of the current Macbook 16 years later.

Until you start comparing the bandwidth/speed of that RAM and SSD, at least…

Indeed, you fill it up even quicker nowadays.

I don't know. The iBook G4 had DDR 333 MHz PC2700 at best. The modern SSD of a Macbook M3 is about twice as fast in GB/s (2.5GB/s vs 5GB/s). The latency is likely worse, but at the same time the M3 has much bigger L1 and L2 caches (192KB*8 vs 64KB, and 16MB vs 512KB).

If you think about how a lot of people use their Macbooks all they really need is a 13” iPhone. And the 15 Pro has 8 GB of RAM.

I used OpenCore Legacy Patcher to put Monterey on my early 2009 unibody (speed bump from the late 2008 model) and it runs alright still.

Those things are tanks. It really frustrates me that Apple stops updating the OS after 5 to 7 years.

Linux runs great on them, at least.

Just install a modern Linux, that's what I did with my 2012 unibody MBP (which I'm typing this reply on).

You’ll either need to give up GPU acceleration on the unsupported upgrade to post-Mojave, or lose the Firefox support later this year on the next LTS. I’m not happy about it.

I respect anyone brave or foolish enough to do a drive swap on a iBook.

I've performed this procedure numerous times. While it's not particularly difficult, it requires patience - a LOT of patience. Dozens of the world's smallest Philips-head screws. The iFixit guide helps tremendously.

What strikes me as nostalgic is how repairable these machines were. No proprietary screws, the HDD used a standard (at the time) form factor and interface. The batteries could even be torn down and rebuilt as they used standard cylindrical cells inside. Hell, the keyboard could be replaced without opening the cover! The only thing that was proprietary was the Airport card - which was under the keyboard along with the SODIMM slot, and both could likewise be replaced without opening the laptop. Those days are long gone.

One item of note is I suspect the older versions of OS X lack SSD TRIM support.

Sadly I'm a below-average laptop repairman. My iBook G3 was never the same after I did it (with said guide) - much of the wrist-rest now acts as a click on the mouse and the CD drive ejection mech isn't happy. I could probably fix it with some time and effort, but I honestly never want to open it again. Kudos to you for having it down.

I too lament how closed machines have become and how it affects the environment, data recovery, and just plain ol' repair. Some of those PCI Macs with 603s, 604s and G3s could get up to G4e with CPU boards and industry-standard PCI cards (so long as they had a Mac driver.) Now you can't even add your own storage to most Macs, and the one with PCIe won't let you use your own graphics card.

There used to be a TRIM program you could install. Used one when I swapped out the super drive for an ssd in a 2012 MacBook Pro (I think at around the same time?)

I replaced a keyboard on a unibody MacBook pro. 52 absolutely tiny screws to hold it in.

Newer models have the keyboard riveted in. Hugh Jefferys replaced one and it seems bonkers to do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1Purem1NF0

The clamshell iBook G3 was one of the hardest laptops to take apart, ever.

I remember the first RAM/HD upgrade I did on a Unibody MacBook...mind-blowing simple. Most laptops were such a pain to work on before that.

Edit: I remember some models having the drive in a bay and the RAM in an easily accessible panel (or under the keyboard), but most were a sandwich of tiny panels and cables.

I had a Unibody Aluminum MacBook (the 2008 model) and yeah... flip the battery lid, one screw for the HDD.

That machine had thermal issues, but HDD and RAM was easy.

I've done it before and it's easy assuming you 1) keep track of every screw (egg trays work nicely, and 2) have a lot of patience.

Haven't killed one of these machines yet, nor have I ever had "spare parts" after.

Happened to upgrade my PowerMac G4 Digital Audio model with OWC's PATA SSD (actually was SATA SSD with PATA adapter), It wasn't a slouch with the probably original PATA HDD but SSD made things even faster and I don't have to worry about 20+ years old HDD dying out that much. That SSD saturates the Ultra ATA/66 IDE Bus completely which feels awesome.

Of course when used with Mac OS Classic, the OS is the biggest bottle neck because of it's bad multi-tasking capabilities. That OS reminds me of things we take granted these days, like computer not locking almost completely when decompressing zip package.

It's great fun to put SSDs in retro machines, but I usually opt to use SLC drives for SSD-unaware operating systems. It supposedly can have two orders of magnitude more cycles before the cells start to die. On the other hand, there's lots of conflicting information out there, so not sure if it really makes that much of a difference.

You probably don't run 24/7 disk activity on these retro machines, so SLC is probably not worth it?

Especially now that the consumer SSD market has entirely moved on to TLC and QLC, there isn't a new SLC drive you can buy for a reasonable price anymore. Even if a TLC drive would wear out more quickly in an old SSD-unaware system, they are so cheap at this point that it's not really worth worrying about.

I think it’s worth worrying about on an iBook. The hard drive is in between the motherboard and the palmrest, so replacing it basically involves taking the entire machine completely apart (including having to deal with a ton of really tight snap points). It’s definitely not something you want to do more than once, and I’m not sure how many disassembly cycles the 20 year old plastic can take.

If you do want some insurance, the old over-provisioning trick should still work to prolong the life of the drive when used in a system that doesn't support TRIM. Format the drive on a modern system that does support TRIM, or secure erase it with the manufacturers utility, then create a partition which doesn't fill the entire drive and use that on the classic system that doesn't support TRIM. As long as the system never writes to the unpartitioned area it will remain in the TRIMed state and allow the SSD controller to use it as slack space.

Great tip, I haven't heard of that before.

This kind of sounds like a use case where 2nd hand enterprise SSD's (Ebay, etc) might be appropriate.

Those things fairly commonly still have a shed load of endurance left, though it is a luck of the draw thing.

Particularly if you’re running OS 9 or older Classic Mac OS, as it barely does anything that isn’t user-initiated, which naturally means a lot less disk activity.

Even if you did, there's no way it could ever write so much data

Old tryhard MLC/TLC controllers tended to lock up and/or slow down when used for boot disks and/or used with OS that had no ATA TRIM command support to explicitly unallocate disk sectors. For this reason, SLC disks and CompactFlash under 8GB were used to be recommended. But that's like 10 years ago.

It definitely speeds up the data transfer rate and makes them a lot faster, a better experience. Sadly you're still limited to 1 processor core in a world where most computers that are in active use have at least have 2 processor cores.

For example I bought a "PiStorm" for my Amiga 1200 computer that uses the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B for processing power (RTG Graphics, RAM, and data storage too via the SD card) and it made my Amiga 1200 useable for daily driving but it's the 4 core Raspberry Pi 4 Model B doing all the heavy lifting, not the Amiga. All I use is the keyboard and the proprietary bespoke chips when playing games that "hit the hardware".

Yeah - I've killed several "fancy" Samsung SSDs due to spending lots of time in swap. One might think a 25 MHz VAX SOC (VAXstation 4000/30) with 24 megs of memory wouldn't be able to do I/Os fast enough to kill a modern SSD within the span of several years, but one would be wrong :)

Even with 0.3 DWPD drives you need to write constantly, 24/7, to reach the claimed TBW in years.

If you are particulary paranoid then just overprovision by bying a larger drive.

Back in the day I removed the optical drive of my iBook g4 to add an ssd as a secondary drive. This is much more the hacker spirit. Awesome. I’m sure it’s just nostalgia, but I really miss the iBook / PowerBook lineup.

Pretty cool.

I did that to a 2009 mac mini ( with an external USB-SSD) .. and it came back to life. Still use it for running some jobs.

Ooff this is a lot of work vs. using an external firewire to sata enclosure - that's what I went with for my powermac G4. But very cool!

I put an SSD in a MacBook pro late 2009 and I love it! I installed Windows 10 and Ubuntu 22.04.

I tried compiling my website with a php/apache and a mariadb containers in docker. I thought that maybe Vite would take forever to compile but no it ran almost the same as my current PC. I was really amazed at how well it all still runs. The main lag I noticed is when you move from page to page the Vite server takes up to a second to deliver the JS, although it is a bit faster when you move back to the same pages.

Sublime Text latest version is smooth as butter.

In Windows 10 I'm able to play Guild Wars, emulators like DuckStation and SameBoy. The GeForce 9400M is still pretty capable. Tomb Raider Anniversary.

I have never replaced the battery! I did a battery full charge and store the laptop at 50% charge, at first it was 2-3times a year and in recent years I even forgot and charged it only once a year. It still shows ~90% full charge capacity. With just browsing and casual use including YouTube the battery runs for at least a couple hours!

When I first booted up this old MacBook, it was an old version of macOS. It looked so dated that it felt like the laptop was good for the bin. I needed a laptop as I move into a co-loc arrangement, something to keep busy until I can set up a new desk etc and I'm really stoked how well it still runs and how usable it is.

The funniest part of all that is ... wait for it... I OPENED the MacBook Pro and upgraded the RAM and the HDD. HHAHAHAHAHAHAAH. It's gotta be the joke of the century. Someday it will be.

With that said for this late 2009 MacBook Pro these are the main downsides :

- the screen is probably the main downside : all the colours look off unless you are totally facing, which means bad posture, and the brighter colours tend to be washed out so you can't really do any decent UX work as all the subtle gradients and color tones are out the window

- stuck with USB 2

- VSCode is pretty usable but you can hear the fans revving up, CPU usage constantly up and down anywhere from 10 to 90% peaks

When I revived the laptop I did in this order:

First I installed Ubuntu 22.04 from a USB key, this worked right out of the bat, I told the installer to just erase the disk. It worked like a charm.

Later I realized I wanted Windows for games. This MBP models apparently won't let you install Windows from a USB key - something to do with the baked in BIOS? I really couldn't bother burning a DVD, fortunately I had an old OG copy of Windows 7 Home Edition Upgrade. I booted the DVD and installed Windows 7, using a generic activation key. Then I inserted a USB key with the Windows 10 ISO which I had prepared earlier, and started the upgrade from within Windows 7. This time I used a key I bought online. The activation didn't work as planned, I called the Microsoft call center, and I just told the person I bought an OEM key etc and they activated it.

So at this point I could simply hold the Alt key while booting to select the drive and it was dual booting perfectly fine.

However I ran into one limitation : I was not able to `mount` the Windows NTFS partition from within Ubuntu. It seems this could be baked in the custom Apple BIOS? The Ubuntu partition somehow can not see the "bootcamp" partition.

I installed reFIT thinking that it would solve the issue but it didn't change anything, just gave me a boot menu that is uglier and doesn't give me any functionality. I wish I didn't install reFIT but it's not a big deal it just shows me an icon for Ubuntu and Windows - honestly the builtin menu on the MBP looks nicer and I believe you could also customize the original boot menu's icons (but I am not sure I would have been able to do this after nuking the macOS partition).

I'm really thrilled with how well it has been running for me the last couple weeks. Been playing a ton of Guild Wars on it.

There's such a satisfaction from making an old hardware not just usable, but actually really useful. And I love that being so old, I don't have to worry about scratching it - even if mine still looks like mint.

I also put an SSD in my 2009 MBP - in 2011! It was $500 for a 256gb drive and it was worth every penny.

Even though that drive is slow and expensive by today's standards, I don't know if it ever really bottlenecked the system. The 8gb ram ultimately couldn't keep up with hungry chrome tabs and electron apps of the mid 2010's.

Yep the 8GB RAM is definitely a limit. I haven't done much coding on it yet tbh, for the light use I make of docker (php/apache/mariadb/vueJS) the RAM seems just ok. And it wouldnt run games that require more RAM anyway. (ps: for VSCode I did what was suggested online and turned off a bunch of extensions I don't really need).

In my case I had a left over 240 GB Samsung SSD from my last PC build. Replaced it with a 1TB nvme. So it was nice to also use a left over SSD. :)

Since then I read I could put a 1TB in it if I wanted - but that seems overkill as it's going to be more of a backup laptop.

What makes the experience so nice is in Ubuntu it would also show a nice popup for the media keys like volume up/down and brightness.

Lucky on the battery.. ours started swelling after about 7-8 years of heavy use, and made the trackpad click by itself. I think I also had to replace the display cable and one of the ram slots stopped working. Other than that it was a solid computer for about 10 years until we replaced it with a 2012 model, still in use.

I wasn't luck with my iPod Nano 3rd Gen however. Recently took it out of the box and I had the same issue with the battery swelling.

The battery pushed on the screen causing a dark spot. It is apparently a common issue with iPods. I will order a replacement battery and fingers crossed I can also revive this little guy. While it was connected with the cable it worked great. And there is an app called Flooza or something that's kinda like a light iTunes that let you manage everything on it.

I didn't make a heavy use of the MBP so there's that. Took it to India though! It survived a night long trip from Delhi to Dharamshala. There was such insane potholes and the bus was shaking so much, and the laptop was in my baggage at the underside of the bus. I thought it was done for :P

I guess it's a nice thing about old hardware is they have a story.

Now I remember the last time I checked my "battery cycle log" on macOS before I did the win/ubuntu installation it was about ~70 cycles so probably much lower than most users. This was in February 2024.

The laptop was always a backup so that may explain why the battery lasted so long. Still I was impressed as in recent years I procrastinated on the battery maintenance and didnt charge it in a couple years.

Tomb Raider Anniversary is from 2007. I wouldn't count it as an indication of how capable the GPU still is.

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