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I've read that it should be possible to push the SE/30 to its maximum RAM capacity with eight pieces of 16 MByte, 30-Pin SIMMs. I've never seen such a machine in the wild. Neither with 64 or 80 MB. Memory test takes a notable amount of time when having 16/20 MB RAM in it. I wonder how long a memory test with full blown 128 MB would take. I'd prefer first-hand real-world measures with a stop watch, not a theoretical calculation.

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    Last year I put 128 MB into a Quadra 605, and it took more than a minute, but less than two. I'm only answering as a comment since I didn't conduct this test recently, my answer is imprecise, and it's a slightly newer machine.
    – Jon Hess
    Mar 6, 2019 at 0:40
  • According to gglabs.us/node/2019, it should take up to one minute.
    – PoC
    Apr 7, 2021 at 9:18

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I maxed out an SE/30 in the early 90s, adding max RAM, external SCSI drives, and a huge grey scale display. I must have installed a third party video card, I just checked, and the SE/30 didn't have built-in 2nd display support. I think I was still using Object Pascal and MacApp back then. The machine took long enough to boot that I would power up the drives and CPU then go get a cup of coffee. I was only 30 feet from my coffee machine, and the machine would be ready when I got back, so no more that 2 minutes, for sure.

The SE/30 was probably the finest tiny screen mac ever made. I was also really fond of the quadra 605 that I replaced it with, an excellent 'mac mini' that was only about as big as 4 of the modern minis ... maybe 16" x 14" x 2.5".

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    One of the Radius graphics cards, presumably? The SE/30 was great in almost every regard — it's even faster than the Macs that replaced it — but I wish Apple had made the built-in display greyscale. Another Radius solution was offered as an internal upgrade, retaining the original CRT, but as you'd imagine it was a bit of a soldering job.
    – Tommy
    Jun 5, 2019 at 13:54
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    Yeah, the builtin display was mostly useless, especially for me, since I was doing a lot of work with ColorQuickdraw (You might well ask, why greyscale? I needed lotsa text more than I needed color, and I'd been spoiled by Sun's displays.)
    – Taryn
    Jun 5, 2019 at 20:08

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