Which G4 PM Am I? Identification Crysis!

Mirror Door Drive (MDD)

It's a Mirrored Drive Door (MDD) and was made after August 2002 and before June 2004.

It's commonly known as a Mirrored Drive Door (MDD for short), or 'wind tunnel' for those who are a little unkind about these slightly noisy Macs.

robotica said:

Thanks for that


now if only i could find the bloomin manual for it on apples site
( i am prob failing due to my ignorance of these models of macs

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Well, it is kind of old.

But, that was a ridiculous deal you just got. You should be really, really happy.

Power Mac G4/1.25 GHz (June 2003)
http://lowendmac.com/ppc/mdd-power-mac-g4-1.25-ghz.html

This model has a 167 MHz system bus, two media drives bays (so you can have a SuperDrive and a fast CD burner), four RAM sockets, and three independent drive buses that each support two devices. An ATA/33 bus is used for the media drives, an ATA/100 bus that connects to the stock hard drive, and an unused ATA/66 bus. There are four hard drive bays inside this G4.

You can place a 5th HD in the lower optical bay, but it will run hotter than normal. You would also want to connect that drive to a SATA/PATA card as the Optical bays are supplied by an ATA-33 bus. I added a PCI Slot fan, two small fans behind the CPU heatsink, removed the internal speaker, left the lower bay's door cracked... and it still ran hot... and noisy. And the power supply died after 4.5 years.

My dad now uses my old FW800 G4, with a lot of extras removed and a new power supply...

Oh, Belgium! It's NOT spelled like that. The frigtards who made that game are idiots!

It's crisis. CRISIS. Didn't OS X's spell-checker catch that?

It's called grammiosis hammeroscopy, and I'm happy to have it.

robotica said:

on my macbook, did not seem to pick it up

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Yeah, I was about to say, "OMGWTFHOW!!?!?!??!?!??!"

Well, since so many people had a problem with the heat/noise, you can find articles everywhere. One of my favorites is here;
http://www.s155158671.websitehome.co.uk/

If it is a single processor, that should help quite a bit. It's just that the case design doesn't fare well when you start loading it up. That's why the G5s/MacPros are so much larger. Much better cooling. You should be able to use many off the shelf USB2 cards, just stay away from the ones made by SYBA that have a Firewire port, good for Panics.

And the Power Supply can only be an Apple one, special design. The new ones are more than US $200... more than what you paid for the G4 Of course, you could get a cheaper used one...

Have Fun

Robotica
I had the dual 867 version of the mirror drive. I really liked the fact that it used memory that was cheaper / easier to find then the early G4's that used the PC133 or PC100 memory.

I added a 4 port Adaptec USB 2.0 card and it seemed to work fine for attaching external devices like camera's and a scanner.

The noise is a bit noticeable, but if you keep the tower under or beside your desk it helps.

robotica said:

does the mac come with no fan on that massive HS by default? or was that an after market mod

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There is a large fan in the case that lines up with the CPU heatsink when you close the case. That's why there isn't a fan mounted on the heatsink itself. The built-in fans are software controlled and begin speeding up at around 133-134F. The idea behind the two extra fans behind the heatsink and the PCI Slot fan is to keep the built-in fans from having to speed-up. With those extra fans My FW800 Dual 1.25 never got above 130F. The built-in fans never ran above idle, keeping them quiet. I had, Two video cards, 1.75GB Ram, a USB card, a SATA card, and 5 Hard Drives. The most heat was generated by the ATI x850 and ATI 7000. If it's just a server, I would suggest a single lightweight video card.