adding a 2nd optical drive to powermac G4

You could put one HD and one Optical Drive on each ribbon (bus), but really it doesn't matter. Just remember to make sure that the Master/Slave settings are correct or that all drives are set to Cable Select, otherwise you'll have problems.

AFAIK, the MDD was ATA133 that should be more than enough to handle your new drive.

TEG

Keebler said:

Hi folks,

So i added a 2nd optical drive (Pioneer 115D) to my mdd dually 1.25 G4.

BUT, i'm sure I didn't do it right. Sure, it recognizes the drive, but I put them on the same bus (Ata-33). I should have them on separate bus', but I have 2 hd in the rear ata-100 drive carrier and 1 in the front ata-66 carrier.

Can anyone tell me how to effectively put them on separate bus'? is there a website with specific directions on how to do it this way?

The reason why I was told to keep them on diff. bus' is b/c they won't function as well (data lockups b/c same bus can't handle data).

thoughts?

Cheers,
Keebler

Click to expand...

I wouldn't worry about the same-bus issue, I had 3 HDD's in my old B&W G3 tower, obviously meaning it had an HDD and optical drive on one bus and 2 HDD's on the other bus, and I never had any problems copying or reading/writing between devices on the same bus.

Now that being said, it's probably faster to write directly from one to the other (ie. burning a direct copy of a CD or unprotected DVD) if they're on separate buses. The only thing I could think of would be:

A) pick up an ATA PCI card (Sonnet makes a nice one)
B) run an ATA cable from the bus intended for the HDD's to the second optical drive (if you have 2 HD's maybe put one HD and one optical on each bus)