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

[Mark M. Florida]

Maybe the "new" ADS case I have doesn't have the same functionality of 
the good-ol' ADS cases (mine's from 2002).

- Mark

On Thursday, February 6, 2003, at 04:44  PM, Thubten Kunga wrote:

> 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
>
>
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