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Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

This hits home even more since I started restoring some vintage Macs.

For the ones new enough to get an SSD upgrade, it's night and day the difference (even a Power Mac G4 can feel fresh and fast just swapping out the drive). For older Macs like PowerBooks and classic Macs, there are so many SD/CF card to IDE/SCSI/etc. adapters now, they also get a significant boost.

But part of the nostalgia of sitting there listening to the rumble of the little hard drive is gone.

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> But part of the nostalgia of sitting there listening to the rumble of the little hard drive is gone.

I remember this being a key troubleshooting step. Listen/feel for the hum of the hard drive OR the telltale click clack, grinding, etc that foretold doom.

Thank the gawds we no longer have to worry about the click of death

Now it's just a silent glitch of death.

I've just finished CF swapping a PowerBook 1400cs/117. It's a base model with 12MB RAM, so there are other bottlenecks, but OS 8.1 takes about 90 seconds from power to desktop and that's pretty good for a low-end machine with a fairly heavy OS.

Somehow the 750MB HDD from 1996 is still working, but I admit that the crunch and rumble of HDDs is a nostalgia I'm happy to leave in the past.

My 1.67 PowerBook G4 screams with a 256GB mSATA SSD-IDE adapter. Until you start compiling code or web surfing, it still feels like a pretty modern machine. I kind of wish I didn't try the same upgrade on a iBook G3, though...

>I kind of wish I didn't try the same upgrade on a iBook G3, though...

Oh god. Those were the worst things ever to upgrade the hard drive. Just reading this gave me a nightmare flashback to having to keep track of all the different screws. This is why my vintage G3 machine is a Pismo instead of an iBook.

Yeah this machine will probably never be the same. It does have an SSD now! But also a CD drive that isn't latching properly and the entire palmrest clicks the mouse button.

It doesn't help that I'm not a great laptop repair tech as is, but wow are those iBooks terrible. The AlBook was fine, and the Unibody MacBooks just a few years later had the HDD next to the battery under a tool-less latch.

I just picked up a 1.5GHz Powerbook G4 12-inch in mint condition. RAM is maxed out but I've been putting off the SSD-IDE upgrade because of how intrusive it is and many screws are involved.

I had a 2011 MBP that I kept running by replacing the HDD with an SSD, and then removed the DVD-ROM drive with a second SSD. The second SSD had throughput limits because it was designed for shiny round disc, so it had a lower ability chip. I had that until the 3rd GPU replacement died, and eventually switched to second gen butterfly keyboard. The only reason it was tolerable was because of the SSDs, oh and the RAM upgrades

Did you ever have the GPU issue? My sister had a 2011, I had to desolder a resistor (or maybe two?) on it to bypass the dGPU since it was causing it to boot loop. But now it's still running and pretty happily for some basic needs!

Yes, that's why it was on the 3rd repair. Apple knew they had issues and replaced it for me before by replacing the entire main board. Twice. The last time I took it in, they would no longer replace for free and wanted $800 for the repair. That was half the cost of modern laptop, so I chose no. I was unaware of being able to disable the GPU like that. I still have it on a shelf, but honestly, I don't see trying to do the hack now but might have considered back then.

I posted how I did it on my blog: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2017/fixing-2011-macbook-p...

Might still be worth doing for someone into older computers, I've considered putting a few of my old computers on the free pile at a VCF!

hmm, it is a Friday with nothing planned for the weekend...

While these are geared toward retrocomputing, there are things that attempt to simulate the sound based on activity LEDs: https://www.serdashop.com/HDDClicker

Uh, the clicks always make me afraid that the drive is going bad. Why the hell would you want to simulate that.

> For older Macs like PowerBooks and classic Macs, there are so many SD/CF card to IDE/SCSI/etc.

Would those be bandwidth limited by the adapter/card or CPU? Can you get throughput higher than say, a cheap 2.5" SSD over Sata 3/4?

You are limited at first by the IDE/SCSI interface, so below SATA speeds.

Oh I must have misread the comment initially as PCIE/SCSI

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