Old Thrashbarg wrote:

I think it's actually ATA33. But the throughput isn't really what makes the big difference with SSDs, it's the seek times (or rather, the lack of them). Compared to the old 4200RPM drive, it would be a huge upgrade.

And anyway, even if the transfer rates of the flash drive are choked by the ATA33 speed, it'd still be better than the ~10-12MB that old 3.2GB drive can probably muster.

Good points. I definitely want to replace the old 3.2GB. Do you think an SSD would offer a significant performance increase over a newer 7200RPM drive though? I'm just wondering bc I could get more GB for less $ although it wouldn't be silent. As the previous poster mentioned, 8GB should really be enough - that is unless I decide to stick OS X, Linux, etc. on there later. I definitely don't want to open this thing up twice 🤣

A flash drive would be a huge jump in perceived speed* over a 7200rpm hard drive. However, a 7200rpm drive would be a huge jump over a 4200rpm drive. Basically, anything would be an improvement, it's just a matter of how much an improvement you want.

*By 'perceived speed' I mean both things like boot times and whatnot, and also the more general feel of responsiveness that's a bit more difficult to put into hard numbers. Like, an old low-end P4 with an SSD will feel faster in a lot of ways than a brand new high-end system with a regular hard drive, even though the P4 is otherwise a crap system.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

You should install the Marathon games on there. Granted, nowadays the second and third ones aren't Mac exclusive, and there's a TC for Marathon 2 that's supposed to recreate the first game, but I don't believe that there was an official release of the original game on the PC.

I finally tried this out and it's pretty cool. I didn't realize it was a Bungie game... Master Chief was really pixelated back then HAHA

Bungie's main schtick before they were bought by Microsoft was Mac gaming, ironically. 😉 In fact, Halo was originally going to be released on the Mac, PS2, and Gamecube. As well, I think it was also originally going to be an RTS.