Slashdot Mirror
Apple IDE Cannot Access Beyond 137GB
An anonymous reader writes: "iMacLinux reported on a PenguinPPC story about Apple hardware being unable to address more than 137GB of space on IDE drives. The Apple computers only have ATA-66, which can only address 28 bits, while ATA-100/133 can address 48 bits. Solutions include using a PCI controller, FireWire or SCSI."
Don't PC's use ATA66 and ATA100 as well?
Go ahead and waste your life with your inhibitions, just don't ruin other people's lives with your intolerances.
Now, while Apple's FireWire support is certainly commendable, lack of USB 2.0 (in a slight war with Intel in competition with Firewire) and the inferior hard drives that ship with even the best machines is lackluster at best.
It is time to let Apple know that drive performance is just as high on our list as such cool things as 1394. I can't plug my DV camcorder up to it (which certainly does reduce marketing value), but a fast IDE bus is still extremely important.
If you're in the mac market, or own one now, make sure to let Apple sales know what you think.
---
Drew Streib, dtype.org
My understanding was that there is no such thing as a 'native firewire' hard drive. All the Firewire drives I know of use ATA mechanisms inside. Some have the Oxford 911 bridge chipset which seems to improve transfer speed quite a bit (over the non-Oxford bridge drives.)
Is there such a thing as a 'native firewire' drive?
Can having an ATA controller in a firewire case make it possible to get around the motherboard limitations?
I assume Apple (like myself) is waiting for deployment of serial ATA technology; this will get around the current size restrictions as well as offer other improvements. I had hoped it would be available by now, but it seems it will be another year or so before it is even targeted for high end consumer level products.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
" Sadly, this is an area where Apple really has dropped the ball. It used to be ... "
that was my exact first thought. first the airport, then the ipod, and now this.
granted, 137GB is a lot of space, but give me a weekend with my girlfriend in bed^H^H^H^H^H^H^H at the lake, and i could fill that up in a relatively short time.
most mac users are creative by trade in some way or another, and those folks seem to find creative ways to use drive space.
on the other side of the market, the fact that there ARE competitors is a huge benefit in a case like this. chances are the others guys stuff doesnt have the same issue, and if it does, thats that many more orginizations rushing to fix it to be first on the market.
people buy macs because they believe they are superior, and stuff like this makes it much harder to believe.
Did you just grab my ass?
I mean, if you're going to address that much hard drive space, wouldn't you use SCSI anyway?
Apple's online store shows the dual 1 GHz systems with 2x80 GB ATA drives, but with an option to do 3x72 GB Ultra 160 SCSI drives. Then, of course there's always FireWire.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Why do apple drives say they have special Apple IDE firmware on them? If this is true how can it also be true that any random IDE disk will even work in an Apple? Perhaps I am confused and should dismantle my iMac :).
Dave
Seriously, the problem and the solution were all neatly bundled up into this story. Hey, I bet a standard Mac can only use 4 IDE devices before you have to add another hard drive controller. *Gasp*. I assume people who need more devices add appropriate upgrades.
By the way, I'm don't think it's necessarily correct to say the Apple hardware doesn't support ATA/100 and therefore doesn't support large disks. It seems the article and some of the posts here are confusing speed with large capacity capability. You can still do 48bit LBA in PIO mode if you want. Just this week I stuck a 160BG drive in an ancient Pentium 100 computer--and I used the whole disk (why you ask? It was for a backup server--large disk, extra cheap computer sitting around). There's no way the on-board IDE chip could have been ata/100 compliant. However, linux plus the ATA patch I installed supported the 48 Bit LBA commands from the ATA-6 spec, so I was able to use the whole disk. In PIO mode too. :-)
:)
I mention this because it's quite possible that the solution to this problem is a little software update from Apple. You computer may not be obsolete yet.
There. Now go play some cool javascript games!
This sounds like an ATA/66 issue, not an Apple issue. What's the deal with all this spin?
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
Apple: "All these machines include FireWire ports that operate at up to 400 megabits per second"
my accent
Firewire has 50 Megabytes per second.
ATA 66 has 66 Megabytes per second.
ATA 133 has 133 Megabytes per second.
SCSI 160 has 160 Megabytes per second.
USB 2.0 has 60 Megabytes per second.
firewire drives will not save apple, they are slow too.
Current ATA drives peak at full ATA spec due to their huge caches. Their throughput on an ATA 100 bus is just under 50 megabytes per second meaning current drives outperform the firewire spec.
Can't exactly daisy chain firewire devices when ONE uses the spec's entire bandwidth.
So much for Apple being the DV platform of choice.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
I have PC 133 in my Mac now. Oh yes, they have this wonderful card (yes I know you'd have to pay for it) called the Acard 6880-M. It ran me about 159 for the card and I bought 2 ata133 Maxtors and lemme tell you... these things are fast. I get about 160 throughput in benchmarks. Its a hardware based raid card, so it works in OS 9 and OS X perfectly. I only wish they'd fix the rom so it would sleep and spin down the disks. I have 220 gig across 4 drives and its pretty sweet. Even if they move to 133, I'd still move this card over for the RAID aspects.
People think Microsoft is the answer. Microsoft is just the question, "No" is the answer.
the parent is NOT flamebait... its simple facts... it looks like the terrorists have already won...
Did you just grab my ass?
Apple's standard configs ship with ATA/66 controllers. This is enough to get the fastest sustained transfer rate of any IDE drive on the market. The only real advantage ATA 133 has over 66 and 100 is that it can accomodate drives larger than 130GB. Last I checked, there are hardly any drives available of that size. The Maxtor 160 is probably the most popular, but the slow 5200RPM speed makes it almost worthless. If you really must have a 133 controller, just buy one - they're pretty much free these days anyway.
"Leave the strategizing to those of us with planet-sized brains." -Tycho
New G4's have Ultra ATA-100, at least according to the guys at my local "Genius Bar". I know the specs on apple.com simply say "Ultra-ATA", that's why I asked. Planning on getting me one of those 933 pups here in a month or so... And for all the "Apple is slow" guys out here, my 667 TiBook running OS X totally runs circles around my old P-III/600 running either Linux or Win2K, and it's a lot easier to look at too.
cat
I guess I just be ahead of the curve or something, but the title of this article is a total "DUH!" for me. The new 48 bit addressing scheme has not even "set" yet. There is a DAMN good reason many large capacity ATA drives come wtih a FREE ATA 133 card. Until everything is nailed down on this standard, get a card/drive bundle, or at least make sure your ATA card is certified by the drive manufacturer.
:-)
I'm perfectly happy to use one of my more-or-less-useless PCI slots for one of these cards. They just gather dust anyways.
There are sadly few drives that could even come close to saturating the bandwidth of the buses they are connected to. IDE/ATA is a respectable bus in that it is low-cost with a pretty good price point.
:)
However, the designers of the standard must not have been thinking straight when ironing everything out. I mean, 28 bits? Why not 32? I mean, there could have been a good reason for it, like ECC or parity bits when used with a 32 bit total addressing space. I still say that they should have used more space sooner. I doubt we'll see 48 bits being used effectively for a while, but then again, who thought I'd be using 1024 MB of RAM in my PowerBook 10 years ago?
I'm not sure what kind of limitations FireWire has addressing-wise, but I have a lil' 40 GB Maxtor running @ 5400 RPM, and it's a great unit. I'm thinking of buying a bigger FireWire disk, such as a 160 GB drive, but I don't have any use for SCSI any longer. While most Macs came with SCSI for a very long time, the flavor included ran at 5 MB/sec (yes, megaBYTE) which is 1/10 the speed of FireWire.
As for USB2, I'd say it is pretty much worthless. Being a machine dependent bus, it is a lot less effective than FireWire which can do device-to-device transfers.
(It may be long and rambling, but there might be something useful for you, Mr and Mrs. Mod! Hehe.
I think you have it backwards. The PC of two years ago is MORE than enough for most endusers. I have a lot of hardware here in my cave, and I can say that I can barely feel the difference when web browsing, typing, emailing, etc. between my 400MHz machines and my 1400MHz machines. We have hardware that is far beyond adequate for most user's needs. Apple is focusing on their OS rather than their hardware. I think we need more innovation and advances in human interfaces, network transparency, and other software-side aspects of computing, not 18 BazigaHertz DDRAMBUS PCI-X MiniCrays on our desks. Apple is going somewhere with this whole UNIX/airport/gigabit lan/appliance thing, trust me.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
just by an ACARD ATA133 PCI Controller wich will bring you full size-compatibility up to all big drives :-) It even works under mac os x !
Martin
(playmax.de)
Slightly offtopic, but didn't think of a better place to ask.
What about Sun's IDE on Blade 100, Netra X1?
Would be nice to have one of those for compatibility testing, was just wondering if they're any good otherwise.
Athlon XP @ 1826/166fsb is the first computer I have ever owned (including a 733 G4/512k) that can scroll through a PDF with no draw in lag. None. It looks just like scrolling through a simpletext document. You can actually read the PDF without printing it. If speed isn't an issue, why does apple release faster models? Migrateing to commodity PC hardware is like breathing easy after years of suffocation: I didn't even know I was suffocating. Apple coddles users into thinking thay have a high performance machine the way VW coddles new beetle owners. It's fast and sporty and shiny and glossy and will get it's doors blown off by the first old rx-7 that crosses it's path. What is wrong with a cray? Why do you think I water cool? Just surfing? Hardly. I can actually rip a DVD to mpeg4 in real time. Apple cannot even play the divx codec.
I'm not a PC fanboy. I work with Apples for a living. I respect them as far as user experience goes but never will I make the mistake of assuming that an Apple has any speed at all. Quadra 650? Put netBSD on that thing. you might learn what memory management and multitasking are. I'm sure you put a lot of love into some old macs but it is time to move out of the world of education and into a real machine. The world loves an underdog but they are beaten -- often
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Hmmm, I was just about to get a 160GB drive. Suppose I'll have to opt for a samller drive - I've got a 10GB and a 30GB drive at the moment and as far as I'm aware I will have to remove one of them to install another IDE hard drive - or else get a SCSI card. Is this right or am I going to be able to install another IDE drive in some other way?
Everyone knows that 10MB of storage is more then enough space. 136 GB? That's enough storage for 3600 friends... Nobody has THAT many friends... except for maybe Zorro.
Processor speed and the speed ot your graphics windowing engine are two different things. In OS9, quickdraw handles all of the redraw you describe. It's very old and needed to be replaced. So they did.
OSXs Auqua, while still new, has some problems but is getting better. Many users say it feels slow. To me, it feels very snappy on a 733 G4 here are work...
I'm getting tired of IDE garbage (let's face it, it's been suffering incremental now-it-sucks-less improvements for ten years). It's slow, buggy, and annoying. My question is, when will we see internal firewire drives?
Drives can be powered by the firewire bus, if necessarily (but why bother unless their usage is low, like zip drives), the cables are much easier to manage than ribbon cables and make getting around inside far easier (Apple has solved this in their G4 cases, but most haven't).
It's also 400 megabits (at the moment), is DMA (needs it for guaranteed bandwidth, for cameras and so on), inherantly needs no drivers, and so on. I've also seen PCI Firewire cards that have internal connectors (three external USB2, two external Firewire, and one each internal), so when will we start seeing the drives?
--Dan
I have one very serious question: How the hell can you encode to MPEG4 in real-time if there aren't any commercially available MPEG4-compliant encoders on the market because of licensing not being nailed down by the board yet?
;-) is a hacked codec which originated as MS' submission to try to get them to use ASF as the MPEG4 file format, which failed. MS wrote the codec (which is now WMV7) to help demonstrate the advantages of using ASF. This codec was then plugged into for the first couple of versions of DivX ;-), hence the smiley. Then with 4.x, they moved over to their own codebase.
DivX
If you are going to bash a group for something, get the facts straight. I can view DivX on this Mac, and the DivX programming group even released their own codec for MacOS 9/X users. Not to mention DivX Player for OS 9 users, and Jamby's DivX component for QT under OS X, plus others have given Jamby's CLI tools a decent GUI interface so that converting the hacked AVI format to something QT can natively read is easy (the DivX hack produced non-standard AVI files, and QT chokes on non-standard AVI files).
The thing is, your posts has holes, and isn't even on-topic. If you are going to use this board to bash us, at least do it over the topic. Suffice it to say, I have a pre-G3 8600 @ 300Mhz which runs pretty damn well. PDF is not an issue in readability or speed, especially when running OS X (unsupported) on this machine. However, I do realize this 5-year-old machine doesn't do what I need it to these days, and a jump to a better machine will do me a world of good for the arenas I intend to enter after college.
On the topic itself, this is hardly new, and as one person pointed out, the 48-bit addressing can be done in software. Or as another person pointed out, get the free ATA133 card that comes with most large HDs from Maxtor or Western Digital, or whatever. This isn't exactly a Mac-only issue, has been around for awhile, and I am not even sure why it was posted in the Apple section. I ask, should this ARTICLE be moderated as (-1, Flamebait)?
OK. Let's clarify a few things.
733 G4 is not two years old. Whrere the hell did you get that? and there are the 800, 867 and 933 G4 processors that top the 733 you say is the fastest before the 1Ghz.
Who cares if my COMPUTER has Dolby 5.1? This is why I have home theatre so i can use my couch.
My "user experience" on my 667 G4 with OS9 is sooooooooooooo much better than my expereince on my 1.5 Ghz P4 with XP headache. Smooth and painless, and Photoshop is freaky fast, much faster that the P4.
If you step back, the iMac is quite nice, and gets nicer whren YOU TURN IT ON TO USE IT. What freking overheat issues? What grey? Why is it dim? i have used on extensively, and it is snappy, VERY quiet and uses the CD drive just fine. How long have you used yours? Did you see all the ones on at the Expo??
The G4 DP 1Ghz does not use DDr RAM, the NVidia video board does, but the Ram is still PC133. Again, not seeing the actaul facts.
Dual Athlon may be half the $, but you have deal with Windows XP. I think I'll pay more to be MS-free.
Do you see all your mistakes, omissions and misinformation in the post? Or did you tune out to all things Mac when you went to the dark side?
The 733 G4 is a nice machine. The older ones had more cache and so processed more instructions per clock cycle (less waiting on slow memory) than later G4s. The old 733s were not passed for performance until the latest 933 and 1000 machines. I really like OS X and even 9.0.4, 9.1, and 8.1 so it is really aggrevating for me that Apple's hardware is so far behind state of the art. I get the feeling that it is not entirely their fault because they subcontract so many parts. Video from ATI and Nvidia, chips from IBM, Motorola, Toshiba, AMD, different drive vendors, assembled in Mexico, here, Malasia. The list goes on and on for a company that is basicly a software vendor and intellectual property holding company. Rambus doesn't make Rambus memory and Apple doesn't make Apples. If the vendors say they can only make PC600 Rdram and The Spec calls for PC800, it's back to the drawingboard or find a new manufacturer except the clock is running so you settle for the slower solution.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Under hardware competition from Power computing, The 8600/300 was a nice machine. You can stuff a Sonnet G4/450MHz into it to bring it up to speed but with a 50Mhz fsb and its use of 168pin fast page memory (now there is a great example of apple foisting off a dead end technology on their faithful users). Upgrade is not much of an option.
/.
The DivX 4.xx codec was originally Microsoft's but was extended by Intel for SSE. I know you will not claim Macs have SSE tucked inside the Velocity engine. DivX 4.11 allows the conversion of DVDs to MPEG 4 in real time. Meaning as you watch it, it's recording. You see, PC users are cheap bastards (or just not suckers) and are not willing to pay an extra 1000 bucks for a super drive to copy DVDs when they can do it for free.
The problem is, right now, 95% of the people ripping movies are using this fast codec. And DivX Networks, the makers of "the playa" and the codec, does not support Apple because of the aforementioned help they got from Intel. SO, Apple is ass out and must use the $1000 solution. And sure the drive is not $1000 but the machine that carries the drive starts at a price point $1000 higher than a PC capable of ripping DVDs in real time and burning said movies to CD a MUCH cheaper medium because it avoids the MPAA's tariff on DVDs.
As for picture quality, it's good enough that I cannot tell the difference between DVD and MPEG4 at 1600x1200 @ 32bit on my DP2040u 22 inch monitor, where I chose to spend the thousand dollars I saved by buying a PC instead of another Mac. What is the price point for 22" on the Apple side of the house? $2,499.00, more than an entire PC with a 22 inch monitor.
And for playback, because Apple cannot seem to understand the relevance of file extensions and thinks all MPEG4s are created equal, you can see the picture when you play back a DivX 4.11 MPEG4 but you cannot hear the sound.
Of course there is always iMovie. Not iMovie2 unfortunately. The original iMovie was a great application. It's a shame they had to change it. But like you said it doesn't matter because you are, luckily, abandoning the platform anyway and your current machine would take $344 to buy 256 megs of a dead end ram spec (256 megs of ram for PC costs about $80) and a $300 processor upgrade. $80 for an ATA/66 card and $100 for usb/firewire support. For $830 you can build yourself an extremely fast PC, comparable in performance to a G4 933.
Nice of you to come over from macslash. krevinek@mac.com I presume? You stated the same thing over there very nicely.
"Oi, should I mention again that MPEG-4 (the video codec) isn't MPEG-4 (the actual standard)? The MPEG-4 Apple is going to support is the MPEG-4 file format. What MPEG-4 compliant codecs will be available, we shall see (DivX, MPEG4v3 or whatever IS NOT MPEG-4). Sorry for the rant, just a little annoyed."
Osama is evil, evil is a state of mind, Osama lost his. So if he lost his mind, and evil is a state of mind, how can he be evil?
I'm sure your head is strained keeping your stories straight.
Oh, and welcome to
I've been trolled and lost an hour responding.. crap.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
This is /. No one here uses XP for anything but drink coasters.
Oi, I am not keeping my stories straight? Point out where I contradicted myself. I dare you. MPEG-4 is the standard set forth by the board setting the standard. This standard includes strict guidelines on how MPEG-4 codecs *AND* files are supposed to work. The group working on DivX ;-) never consulted with these guys on this, or even followed their guidelines.. here are a couple of reasons why it isn't MPEG-4:
;-) manages to even break AVI to some extent. QT has AVI support, but the MP3 support slammed into the AVI for DivX ;-) doesn't completely follow the AVI spec, and so QT cuts out after the first half-second or so.
;-), in using MP3 and WMA for the audio, goes outside the MPEG-4 spec by using an MPEG-1 and proprietary audio technology. The current audio codec that seems to be getting pushed is Dobly's AAC codec they produced awhile back hoping to get it used in DVDs. I am not aware if it was accepter there or not.
;-) doesn't do this.
;-) is MPEG-4 based. Apple's QT6 has MPEG-4 compliance with its support. You have fallen into the FUD trap started by some poor ignorant fool who mistook the 'MPEG-4 based'
phrase on the DivX site to mean 'This is really MPEG-4!'.
;-) is MPEG-4, as it never was, isn't, and unless they make a fairly large effort, will never even be compliant. 3ivX is the same way, but was aimed at taking out DivX ;-) as a truely cross-platform solution, with smaller bitrates than DivX ;-) for the same quality.
;-) is good right now as a solution for distributing online video, especially bootlegs of movies (which seem to be the main reason, backups I understand, but the majority of the use has been digital bootlegging and leeching) and digital anime fansubs (which can also be argued as bootlegging depending on your POV). Some people have been distributing work in DivX ;-) which is a good thing.
;-) codec is true as I stated, as the first true player for the Mac used the MSMPEG4v3 ASF codec in WMP 6.3 to play the video. As DivX ;-) has grown, they removed their hooks into the Microsoft codec. I would seriously doubt if MS would let them go public if they didn't. Your statement of non-support for MacOS, go to divx.com and look on the downloads page for the 4.11 alpha drivers they recently released. For alpha they are actually very usable and stable. They only lack the speed that the 3rd party solutions have. The issue with 'no sound' is because of the odd abnormal method they are storing sound in the AVI file, and that is easily corrected with the DivX tools available for the Mac.
1) It does not completely follow the final guidelines put forth by the standard for MPEG-4 video codecs.
2) It isn't available using the MPEG-4 file format, which was based on the QT4 streaming format, not the AVI format, and DivX
3) DivX
4) MPEG-4 video codecs are supposed to be fairly cross-compatible from my understanding, encoding with one codec and decoding with another should be little to no problem, as long as they are BOTH MPEG-4 compliant. DivX
There is a huge difference between MPEG-4 based, and MPEG-4 compliant. DivX
As I stated, as it stands now, it is illegal to release any true MPEG-4 encoder/decoder to the public, since you have to pay royalties to the MPEG LA. However, since the MPEG LA hasn't finalized their licensing scheme for MPEG-4, nobody is going to pay out royalties to them until they nail it down. Plus, the current working license requires content creators/replicators/publishers to pay out royalties to them, and this is pissing quite a few people off. NEVER make the mistake of thinking DivX
Sure DivX
The source of the DivX
Also, I got 256MB of RAM for this thing, 2 FPM DIMMs for 70$, still more than I would be paying for a decent PC133, but isn't the 300+$ you claim, and your price for the PC RAM is off as well, I can get 256MB for about 50$. Question I have is, why grab an ATA card for an old machine when you can use FW? I can grab a 60GB FW drive for 200$, and switching to a new machine, I would be better off getting an external that I can use more easily, even if I get a laptop. That saves a slot, and takes the price to get USB/FW down to 50$ (20$ USB card, 30$ FW card). I wouldn't dare upgrade the CPU, since the bus can't handle it. Better save the money for a new machine.
DivX is completely unsuitable for professional use because of the MP3 audio track. Basically AVI wasn't designed for VBR audio, so it's unpossible to keep the audio and video in sync in DivX. Whether or not that affects your pr0n viewing is up to you. There is some opensource work going on to replace the AVI fileformat with one that (a) works and (b) is more ripper-friendly than ASF, etc.
That being said, Apple should support DivX (or MP3-in-AVI) as an end user format, but their pro/semipro market doesn't give a shit. And G4s can do realtime Sorensen which is a much better codec on DivX on a much wussier CPU (thanks to the av stuff). Not to mention that none of this has anything to do with DVD burning.
Ok, I concede. And added you to my friends list, which I guess makes me a fan of yours, well argued. I'm a hardware guy, as you may have guessed. I can see you are a programmer. Well, happy developing.. or.. something.. ;)
Games driving the market? Nearly 100%
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
...its use of 168pin fast page memory (now there is a great example of apple foisting off a dead end technology on their faithful users).
Eh? IIRC Apple started using 168pin DIMMs in 1995 when 72pin SIMMs were the norm on pcs..
The genius is wrong. According to the new technote on the new G4s, it supports only ATA-66
v el oper_Notes/Macintosh_CPUs-G4/PowerMacG4/2Architect ure/KeyLargo_I_O_Controller.html
v el oper_Notes/Macintosh_CPUs-G4/PowerMacG4/1Introduct ion/New_Features.html
"The KeyLargo IC implements a single Ultra DMA/66 hard disk interface. This interface supports the boot drive and can accommodate a second hard drive."
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/hardware/De
The only differences between the previous (pre 1GHz) G4 and the new ones is the graphics card, higher bundled RAM and new G4 processor.
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/hardware/De
David
you recall correctly which means it laste a little less than two years. It would have been nice if they had thought of a platform upgrade cycle without selling you an entirely new machine. The memory became obsolete, Almost forcing an upgrade for a platform that claims to have a 5 year life cycle. Even hated RDRAM has lasted longer than 2 years. SDRAM has lasted 4 and will make 6. DDR started just last year so who can say, except its adoption is so widespread and DDR platforms are planned into next year, It will have a longer life cycle too. Apple jumped on an interim solution that trapped their users without a clear upgrade path.
Much like the real topic, The latest iMac with no shot of getting a pci solution, stuck with a max hardrive size that will be obsolete in a year and not even made in two. Current ATA drives already exceed the firewire specs 50 Megabytes per second (400 Megabits) Meaning the new iMac is in an upgrade dead end before it even starts. Compare to the Original Bondi: Same max hardrive size and uses a memory spec that will continue to be used for at least 2 years. That is 6 solid years of platform life for the Bondi compared to the new iMac with 2 years of platform life and a flatscreen with maybe 2 years of life if used in a school enviroment (the iMacs traditional forte).
Not to mention they raised the Apple barrier to entry 500 dollars. They have certainly shown they know how to shoot themselves in the foot as far as hardware is concerned to the same level that Microsoft does on security, Linux does on usability, sun does on getting platform support, and IBM fails to capitalize on their intellectual property, Intel trips trying to keep up with AMD and AMD cannot market their superior products.
All companies drop the ball. The only difference is, with the image they are cultivating, and their position in the market (declining), they absolutly cannot afford to.
My objective is not to flame apple but to provide apple a wake up call. They have made mistakes but they have also had some AMAZING successes. I want to see them continue to make the ferraris of the computer world but ATA66, 100Mhz Front side buses and computers with no upgrade path without flat out buying new hardware ARE NOT FERRARIS
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
I wish I could say the same. I'm typing this from my new iBook (600Mhz Combo drive). I was once part of the 'Apple is fast' crowd. but after using it for 3 days, and I've gone to the 'Apple is slow' crowd. Well, atleast for all the G3 macs.
I think I'll pulug in a 256MB stick and make my final desicion then. It's currently 128MB. And I've heard alot of people say that it's not enough. I think they are right.
The question is how much faster it will run after the RAM injection.
Hmmmm..... Back on topic again. I've always found that Apple are a bit slow when compared to the lastest PC standards, and it's quite annoying sometimes. But then, they are usaly ahead in other areas--like FireWire and USB for example.
Thanks for the 411. I will go beat the genius with the cluestick. I had this funny feeling when I wrote that post... Thanks again.
cat
If you're talking about adding 256MB to the 128MB, that should improve things a lot, at least with OS X. The system is definitely paging out with 128MB. I suggest 384MB or 512MB, because 256MB is a little slim, even when using the nifty window compression for OS X, IIRC, you get about 50MB free with window compression turned on w/256MB. @512MB, my TiBook hardly ever pages out.
cat
I've seen PCs that use 168pin fast page chips, and I own machines (old Compaqs) that use stuff more bizarre than anything Apple ever produced (with the exception of the 68-pin SIMMs in the IIfx which is about the most bizarre PC memory of all time.)
The point you are leaving out is that until (what's now known as) "PC66", there were no common memory standards in the industry and system builders essentially had to gamble on new tech. And lots of vendors got it wrong lots of times -- which why that memory standards were developed and adopted. Even RAMBUS, as proprietary as that is, has broader support than most of the stuf on the market 5-10 years ago.
whoever you are, THANK YOU, i appreciate this SO MUCH!!! i just happened to have some disk images of A/UX i downloaded the other day due to macslash....drive setup v3.0.1 (A/UX) was in there. it's formatting right now. i owe you at least 10 bucks. thank you thank you thank you thank you
It looks like I'll only be able to add 256MB, bringing it to a total of 384MB. You can get 512MB SODIMMS that will fit the iBook. But it's very expensive from what I hear. But if can get it. I will give me boot to 640MB, that would be nice!
Thanks for the window compression tip.
No hard feelings, it is just that DivX ;-) and MPEG-4 has become the target of some ugly FUD, and it helps both to clear it up (hopefully both). I do know MPEG-4 will do one major thing well that DivX is having problems doing at all: streaming. Hopefully when the licensing issues are sorted out, we will see the Sorenson-encoded trailers online switch to MPEG-4, which have a good shot at allowing non-QT streaming clients to view them.
Anyways, you are right about games driving the market. Games drive consumer hardware development, and video/server applications driver pro/server end hardware development.
If it wasn't for games, video and server applictions, we would *ALL* still be sitting on pre-ATA/66 IDE buses, with a 66Mhz FSB, and 300Mhz CPUs. Without those taxing applications, there wouldn't have been a need to push forward like many have.
This does beg the question, why did it take Apple so long to switch to ATA-100 in the PowerMac line? Another question I have is, what HDs are currently capable of saturating 100MB/sec buses? Sure you can have 2 on each channel, and max out each at 50MB/sec, but which ones are available? The highest I have seen HDs go so far are 40MB/sec sustained for ATA buses.
The spinward edge of the Western Digital Caviar WD1200BB (120GB capacity) has a sustained transfer rate of 49MB/s. It slows to About 29MB/s when reading near the hub. Two of these drives are far more than capable of saturating the ATA100 spec especially when you consider they have 8Mb of cache that allows them to burst (reading data prefetched from the drive) to fill the ATA100 bandwidth spec. The cache is much more usefull for writing small files because there is no chance of cache miss (having cached data that the OS never asks for).
Generally Platter size tends to be incremental. The WD1200BB has 40GB platters and it's predecessor had 30GB platters. The density difference was worth about 10MB/s at 7200rpm. 10000rpm at the same platter size will add about 10% and the 20% for the next platter size. I can guess that drives will hit 60+ MB/s by the end of this year. The rock bottom model will be 60Gb and the top end could be as high as 240Gb on a single drive.
This makes a great reason to finalize the ATA133 spec because Intel is not going to finish serial ATA anytime soon.
Sounds like we can have pure DVD disk images of every movie we rent on our desktops. Even now a Terrabyte of storage is within the grasp of power users. For under $2000. The cost of my first 2mb hardrive. For my apple 2. I can't wait to see what happens in the next twenty years.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
No problem. Thanks for pointing me where to find the "real" info about Macs.
cat
Oops sorry, I mean thanks to the Beakster for the tip.
cat
Apple didn't "foist" off anything with that RAM. Apple was simply the first consumer manufacturer to go to the DIMM form factor, before SDRAM became widely used. At that point in time, it wasn't even certain what the next memory technology standard would be, so sticking with 5V FPM wasn't such a bad idea. By the time the PC cloners moved to DIMM memory, 3.3V SDRAM had become the standard.
And those DIMMs are pretty cheap on ebay these days. Even last year I was able to get a pair of 128M for $90 each. My old Power Tower Pro (and the Power Wave I found cheap recently) has eight sockets, for a total of 1 gigabyte max. The last time I checked, they were down to $50-$60 each on ebay.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
mkay...
Do you have any idea how absurd you sound?
$720 for a gig of crap ram? Your position is indefenceable.
check ebay Item:
# 2002994436
# 2002609802
# 2002659737
You are going to pay that much for crap ram on ebay, you might as well get a G4-400 with 512 mb of ram included.
The deapth of your ignorance astounds me.
pathetic troll.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
$30.00 for 128Mb 168pin EDO
:)
I kept looking because the best price I could find seemed so absurd. This somewhat discounts my rant at you -but- you were the one that paid $180 for $60 dollars worth of ram
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
and it fails at that simple task, too.
*make the world a better place, NEVER use any MS solutions*
Once again, we get to bend over & pay the Mac Tax.
If some uber-savvy hw geek would like to step up & present a way to use the PC ATA controllers, be my guest, plllease.