Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[ssp3]

@vectrex, to be sure, always check the data transfer integrity with this tool. ATTO speed test is not enough..

[smilesdavis]

As of September 15–16, 2026, the forum has just reached a major milestone on the 17" Aluminum PowerBook G4 PowerBook5,1: a patched Mac OS ROM now brings its Texas Instruments PCI1510 CardBus controller to life under Mac OS 9. The SeriTek CardBus SATA card is already talking to disks, and the tester reports successful disk transfers.

So there are really three answers:

Question   PowerBook
Fastest PowerBook with CardBus, period   17" PowerBook G4 1.67 GHz Hi-Res/DLSD, PowerBook5,9 (2005)
Fastest officially OS 9-bootable CardBus PowerBook   Titanium G4 1 GHz, PowerBook3,5
Fastest currently demonstrated on MacOS9Lives with working unsupported-OS9 CardBus   17" AlBook 1 GHz, PowerBook5,1

The MacOS9Lives result is extremely recent. On September 15, 2026, UnexpectedBomb reported that the patched ROM made CardBus appear under OS 9 for the first time. Shortly afterward, vectrex demonstrated a SeriTek 2-port eSATA CardBus card actually communicating with and transferring data to an SSD.

Can the new AlBook CardBus ROM patch be made to work on PowerBook5,8 / 5,9, especially the 1.67 GHz 15"/17" DLSD?

If yes, the 1.67 GHz 17" PowerBook5,9 could become the fastest Mac OS 9 PowerBook with functional CardBus, substantially faster than your 1 GHz TiBook. But I have not found a MacOS9Lives verification yet for 5,8/5,9, so I would not call that working yet.

And importantly, the forum is now testing real PCI/CardBus devices, not merely getting the OS to boot.

I’d target the PowerBook5,9 1.67 GHz 17" next and check whether its CardBus controller/chipset matches closely enough for this new ROM patch.