external drive mod?

[kwajo.com]

i have a useless old firewire cd-rw drive from LaCie. is it possible to crack it open and plug in a different device? or is it specific to that original drive? what i am getting at is whether it would kind of work as a firewire to ide bridge. if so am i absolutely crazy in ripping out the cd-rw and slapping in a hard drive?

[lbodnar]

Typically it is possible. Just make sure your CD-RW is a standard 5.25" normal type and not slim notebook-like as they use different type of internal connectors.

What is power adaptor's output rating?

[kwajo.com]

well i opened the case and all the connectors look standard (IDE and power). i can't find the power output on it, all i know is the actual CD-rw inside it. maybe i'll dig up an old hard drive and give it a whirl. after all, i already voided the warrantee :D :rolleyes:

[lbodnar]

Let us know how it went!

Normally CD-writers have about the same power requirements as HDDs. Somewhere around 0.5-1A on both 5V and 12V. Hard drives have spin-up power peak at about 1-2A but I would assume the same is true for CD-writers.

My old HP CD-RW power supply rated at 2A on 5V and 1.2A on 12V output. Switcheable power supplies simply turn off if power requirements is exceeded so as soon as you can spin-up HDD you are OK. To test it you don't even need a connection to a Mac.

[kwajo.com]

well i popped in an old 7200 rpm 20 GB maxtor drive i had sitting around, and it mounted fine on the desktop, but when i ran xbench the results were horrific! the response from the drive was slow at best. anyone know if this might be the jumpers or something? maybe it just can't take the HD type speeds, or maybe it was that the drive was formatted as an MS-DOS volume. any ideas?

[Lanbrown]

How old is old and how horrific is horrific?

[krimson]

what is the current jumper setting?
what interface is the old drive that you had just laying around?

and what are you comparing it with...? a new faster interfaced drive?

[lbodnar]

I guess it is due to FAT format. Look at this:
Old 4Gb Fujitsu FAT32:

Disk Test 15.77
Sequential 12.70
Uncached Write 10.51 4.38 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 10.69 4.38 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 28.02 4.44 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 11.05 4.46 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 20.80
Uncached Write 19.75 0.30 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 16.30 3.68 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 43.15 0.28 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 17.52 3.60 MB/sec [256K blocks]

New 60Gb Maxtor from iMac in the same FW case formatted HFS+:

Disk Test 71.84
Sequential 68.40
Uncached Write 73.20 30.51 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 72.54 29.70 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 57.56 9.11 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 73.20 29.58 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 75.64
Uncached Write 75.23 1.13 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 83.32 18.79 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 70.59 0.47 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 74.51 15.34 MB/sec [256K blocks]

[idkew]

maybe a cheap firewire to ide bridge? my guess is that the cd-rw did not need much throughput, so the manufacturer chose the less expensive chip which did what it needed, but no more.

[kwajo.com]

it was a 20.4 GB, 7200 Rpm, DMA/ATA-100 (Ultra) Interface, 3.5" x 1/3H maxtor drive form maybe 1.5 years ago, maybe 2, i don't recall exactly. the results on xbench were somewhere in the order of 10-25 on that program's scale. maybe i should try a format to HFS+ and see if there is decent performance then. i'll let you know as i experiment

[kwajo.com]

well i couldn't risk formatting the drive i tested previously, so i did format an even older 1 GB Fujitsu. the xbench scores are equally slow with numbers ranging from 5 to 38. right now i'm putting on some raw dv files and i'm going to test how they play and how usable they are for editing. if that experience is anything like the benchmarking, i'm just going to suffer and buy a new enclosure that was designed for my purposes.

[kwajo.com]

just as an update, in case anyone was wondering, I put a new Pioneer DVD burner in the LaCie enclosure and it works beautifully! I've burned at least a hundred DVDs flawlessly, so I guess the mod is possible, and very worth it! :D