Modern Storage On An Ancient Mac - Or How To Do It Cheapo

A semi-sensible way to upgrade an ancient Mac to faster/quieter/larger (the drive I had was 2GB, partitioned for MacOS 8.6 and BeOS at that) storage is to use a SCSI2SD device, which allows you to access the file system from a compatible OS with an SD reader, swap "disks" (cards), and so on. But one of these is $98, plus whatever shipping and possibly taxes I'd get hit for; and while its tested with a similar machine (the 6400), it may not work on my 5400.

Plus it'd be a bit more complicated to connect it internally, as the supplied HD in the 5400 is IDE - the CD is SCSI.

But that IDE use gave me another option, both a lot cheaper and vastly quicker. One of the bigger European vendors of memory and storage products is based a few miles from my house, and €22 got me a 32GB short-size 2.5" SATA SSD, and a SATA-PATA adapter; delivered to my office overnight (so the proximity to my house was sort of irrelevant then)


This fits, or will fit when I put some anti static bag between it and anything metal, where the existing HDD was without an issue. And more importantly, it is being seen without any modifications as a 32GB/29GiB disc by MacOS 8.5, which I am installing first. BeOS is unlikely to have any issue with this either on that basis.

I did say I wasn't going to spend much money on this machine, with the intent of getting a better desktop model; but with the RAM and now a 10/100 DEC 21140 NIC that is allegedly supported by the limited PPC drivers, I'll basically have tricked this out as much as I can with the exception of a L2 cache-slot G3 and a CD burner - I think even the best G3 for it may struggle to do DVDs without an MPEG card - and I'm fairly sure I'll end up with both of those too...

update: MacOS 8.6 with all obvious updates, and BeOS Pro 5.0.3 are now reinstalled and definitely a little quicker, plus a lot quieter.

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