"Green" vs. "Red" mSATA adapter speeds

[ssp3]

Another anomaly on my Mini's native ATA bus.
This time it is Sandisk U110 16GB mSATA drive. The drive is spec'ed at 50MB/s write speeds, but in this case writes drop down to several hundred Kb! And that is with HDT 4.5.2 driver. When initialized with Drive Setup 2.1, machine freezes.

EDIT. It happens with both, Marvell and JMicron adapters.




The same drive works flawlessly in TiBook 667 (see my 2nd post in this thread).
When put on a mSATA to SATA adapter and into Thunderbolt enclosure, I get these speeds in Yosemite.

[ssp3]

The same Samsung drive moved between 3 adapters - Delock Marvell based, "White box" JMicron 20330 based and small form factor, "naked", also JMicron 20330 based. The latter seems to be identical to "White box", except everything is squeezed closer together. Sold by everyone and his brother in China and by Delock (!) in Europe. Surprise, surprise 

In case you were wondering what is the "naked" adapter, I was talking about - it's this one. I forgot to attach the picture in the first place.
How do you like the symbolic 'China transition' on the sticker? 




The design of it is not ideal, if not flawed. The mSATA drive gets mounted right on top of 3,3 Volt regulator, which gets quite hot. JM20330 gets hot too, but not as hot as regulator. As a result, they both heat up the mSATA drive, and, under circumstances, that might trigger the drive's internal thermal protection or reduce its lifespan.

Still, it can be useful, if you pull out your old fart electronic engineer's "sewing pin and piece of cotton swab" trick 
The latter is to prevent accidental lateral movement of the pin.




Speeds of this combo

[ssp3]

I'm taking back what I said about Mac Mini and write speed drops a few posts back 
It appears that those drops occur only with one specific drive family (mSATA or 2.5" versions) and they occur on other ATA-100 bus G4s too.

Here are the results of the same drive in unsupported PowerBook G4 1.33 GHz.
I had it open while I was fitting Hi-Rez 1440x960 display to it and decided to run a couple of tests.
The adapter used was MCA004 v1.3, the 2.5" drive was removed from its case





After setting the PowerBook G4 1.33 GHz to full speed in OpenFirmware. This gave additional ~2MB/s speed bump.

[ssp3]

Just FYI, there is another JM20330 adapter available from 'over there'.
It is marked as HXSATA-IDE V1.3 11.18.
At a first glance, the implementation seems to be the same as with the other adapters, except that they've added three LEDs, a couple of resistors and one transistor.
It is relatively new and, at the moment, it is also the most expensive of any of JM20330 adapters available - around $8.00/pcs or so.

Speeds are the same as with other "green" adapters, so I won't post any graphs this time.

What makes it interesting and the reason I bought it, is, that, when installed, it has the PCB that's "stepping" downwards, as opposed to upwards as is the case with the popular, cheap v1.3 and v1.5 adapters.

Connector  ===
                       II
                         =========  PCB      <- HXSATA-IDE


                         =========  PCB      <- v1.3 and v1.5
                       II
Connector  ===

The dimensions are also different.

I wanted to try it inside the 12" 1.5 GHz PB G4 in combination with one specific low current, low profile "naked" SSD to try to tackle the "crazy fan" problem, that this model has, when mSATA or M.2 adapters are used.
Tested it briefly in my newly acquired 1.25GHz Mini, but, unfortunately the manufacturer used some sub-standard capacitors in the production and, as a result (of piezoelectric effect), that stupid thing is producing whining noise, that is synchronous to changing graphics on the display.
It drives me nuts 
Unless the manufacturer fix this problem, I would not recommend to buy it.

[DieHard]

I guess I got lucky the original msata I purchsed 4 years back was...

ASENNO mSATA Mini PCIe 240GB 256GB Series SSD Solid State Drive (30 50 mm) for Pos Machine and Game Machine

It was real cheap at the time on Amazon and a real "no-name", and seems to hold up well (knock on wood) with read/write speeds Between 86 & 89 MB/sec on all transfer sizes, no heat issues.  These tests were using the Ableconn

[ssp3]

Just by incident I discovered another test utility that was there all the time, right in front of my nose.

It is called TimeDrive. Last version is 3.0.3. Available on Sonnet CDs and on garden too.

Now, this is a monster tool!
If you set the step size small enough, the results will drive any noob, who doesn't know how to interpret them, absolutely crazy. 
The results can be saved as text files, but those will drive II0 crazy too. 

Take a look.