[MacDV] Two 5.25" Drives In An Old G4 or B&W G3 Tower

[Thubten Kunga]

Well I guess your milage may vary. I bought 3 ADS cases back at the 
beginning of their existence for $150 each. They came with Mac software 
to flash the ROMs to work with opticals and mine do. This is the first 
I've heard of problems making any case work with opticals. You want a 
copy of my flash rom software from ADS for Mac?

From: Thubten Kunga <Kunga at FutureMedia.org>
Date: Tue Jan 21, 2003  1:08:04  AM US/Pacific
To: "Macintosh Digital Video List" <MacDV at lists.themacintoshguy.com>
Subject: Re: [MacDV] Two 5.25" Drives In An Old G4 or B&W G3 Tower

I bought a pair of tin snips at the hardware store. I removed the 
plastic front panel and pulled the drive and the 5.25" and 3.5" frame 
it is in after I unplugged the drive's IDE, power and audio connectors 
of course. Then I used brute force to cut the corners of the part of 
the front metal frame that was designed for only a 3.5" zip drive. It 
wasn't easy. I had to use a lot of strength and perseverance to clip 
those thick metal corners off.

Next I used a pair of pliers to bend what metal was left out of the way 
including the bottom part down and out the front opening (there is no 
hope of putting the plastic face back on ever again) so there is now a 
full two 5.25" hole in the front. Inside I had to also use the pliers 
to flatten the 3.5" stubs left on the bottom that were keeping a 5.25" 
drive from laying flat on the bottom of the metal shelf.

After getting everything flattened and bent out of the way, I placed 
the DVD-RAM drive on the bottom (set to Slave) and hooked up one of the 
two power connectors and the middle IDE cable to it. Then I placed the 
DVR-105 (set to Master) above it with the other power cable, the end 
IDE connector and the audio cable (because I plan to play DVDs and CDs 
from the DVR-105) connected to it.

That's it. Closed the door and fired up the computer. No problem. 
Everything works like it should. You need 10.2.3 of course since that 
is the first version of OS X that supports the DVR-105.

I put the PowerLogix G4 ZIF 550 upgrade in there today and it's running 
just fine at 600 MHz with a 300 MHz 1MB L2 cache. So I'm iLife 
compliant and ready. Not super fast, not slow either. The G4 only cost 
me $255 so it was worth it to get Altavec in the old '99 B&W so I can 
run iDVD 3. Already tested it with a copy of iDVD 2.1 I have and it 
works just fine.

It's really an aesthetics thing. I don't look at my computers. They 
live under my tables, not on them. So if you care more about the value 
of having two drives in there than you do about how cute it looks, this 
is a no brainer. I plan to copy my DVD-RAM discs over to DVD-R disks 
and then put a fast 40x12x48 CD-RW drive on the bottom. Then ripping 
MP3s will be really fast in there. The read speed of the CD drive is 
the bottleneck of MP3 ripping NOT the processor speed.

After I cut the corners off with the tin snips, I returned them back to 
the hardware store the next day and got a refund.

Does that completely answer your question?

k

On Thursday, February 6, 2003, at 02:21  PM, Mark M. Florida wrote:

> Warning about the ADS FireWire cases -- they don't support optical 
> drives by default (at least not DVD-RAM drives).
>
> I had the intention to do the exact thing Jim Soriano mentioned in his 
> recent post -- I wanted to install a new Pioneer drive internally in 
> my G4/500 at work and put the factory DVD-RAM drive in an ADS FireWire 
> case.  It didn't work.  I returned the first ADS case because I 
> thought it was defective.  When I got the second one and it *still* 
> didn't work, I called ADS support and they basically said "yeah, those 
> don't work with optical drives unless you can flash the firmware from 
> a PC", of which there are none here (at work) with a FireWire card, 
> and the PCs that we *do* have are highly-used (can't get access to for 
> something like this anyway).  ADS offered for me to send it to them so 
> *they* could flash it, but then I would be stuck with it as an optical 
> drive (DVD-RAM) case, so I wouldn't be able to install a hard drive 
> later on if I wanted...  So now I have a Pioneer DVR-104 installed in 
> my G4/500, an empty ADS FireWire case, and an orphaned DVD-RAM > drive...
>
> Just a heads-up.  If you get an external case for your DVD-RAM drive, 
> talk to the *manufacturer* first to make sure it will work for your 
> application.
>
> Kunga, how'd you "hack" your BW G3 case to support two 5-1/4" optical 
> drives?  I remember seeing some case mods for that somewhere on the 
> 'net a while back, but I don't have that info any more.
>
> - Mark
>
> On Thursday, February 6, 2003, at 03:38  PM, Thubten Kunga wrote:
>
>> 1. Yes
>> 2. Yes. ADS is good. Most of them are fine.
>>
>> 500 Mhz is plenty of guts to burn super slow optical anything. I do 
>> it with a 550 MHz G4 upgrade in a B&W. Also, just so you know, you 
>> can hack both the DVD-RAM and the 105 inside any old Tower. I have 
>> both inside my old B&W.
>>
>> Kunga