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

[Thubten Kunga]

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 Tuesday, January 21, 2003, at 12:02  AM, Tom Kirshbaum wrote:

> Kunga,
>
>> Two pages with complete instructions:
>>
>> http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/install_superdrive_g4.html
>>
>> http://www.dvdcreation.com/2001/08_aug/tutorials/a03install.htm
>
> I've looked at both these pages. They deal with how to install one
> superdrive.
>
> What I was hoping you would talk about was how you installed a 
> superdrive
> without removing the DVD RAM drive so that both would work and be
> recognized, as you mentioned in an earlier post:
>
>>> I have a B&W 450 with a DVD-RAM drive inside. I hacked the DVR-105
>>> inside with the DVD-RAM drive (yes two 5.25" drives inside a B&W Mac)
>
> Did I misunderstand you?
>
> Tom