Some have found that SSDs work better in a different bay on your G5, so I even tried that. At best, it flashed the dreaded System Folder question mark.

The Mac would not boot from anything, including the Leopard install DVD on an external Firewire drive. I pressed the CUDA switch on the motherboard. I was certain it was these problems, so I tried everything in the book. What were some of the symptoms? It acted like it was having motherboard issues, power management issues, or even a dead PRAM battery. I figured it would magically work for me.

( I even note this on my Hardware page about how some SSD drives have jumpers to make them run in a safer compatibility mode.) This PNY Optima did not have any jumpers, but I had hoped I would be lucky. Yes, the drives might say they are compatible with older SATA I or II standards, but that doesn’t always mean what it’s supposed to mean. While I assume there might be 1 or 2 out there that work, SATA III drives often cause funny, bizarre symptoms on our older Macs. In my haste to grab this solid deal, I neglected my own research on SATA III devices and Power Mac G5s. So excited to get this thing going, I almost ended up being late to an event I had that evening. I ordered online and picked it up from the local Best Buy. With an extra $10 off, this was a solid deal to upgrade my G5. I also noted that a decent PNY Optima SSD, 240Gb in size, was on sale. In the midst of holiday sales, I ended up with a $10 off coupon to Best Buy in my inbox. Sometimes, we G5 owners have to learn things the hard way.

Openoffice for mac powerpc g5