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Changing optical drive for second hard drive!?

BlackiBook

BlackiBook

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 1, 2009
386
0
Norman, Oklahoma
Ok so i am not sure if this if the right place to put this but here it goes...

I have a iBook G4, 1.07 GHz, 768 MB RAM, and a very small 30 gig hard drive. Well my question is this, can I put another hard drive in the place of my CD/DVD drive? I just really don't want to go buy a external enclosure for the new drive download superduper, create a bootable clone, and swap them out... I just want the new drive for music and movies...

1. Will a new drive work with the optical drive hook ups?
2. Would it worth the work?
3. just random, I dont do much other than surf and write papers would upgrading the RAM to 1.25 Gigs help much??
 
1st you are better off buying a 2nd HDD! and swap them out, most likely because the new drive speeds will also be allot better! furthermore i Don't think the ibooks rom supports more than 1HD! :confused:
 
First off just wanted to caution you about the idea of buying a current external portable drive and cloning to it and popping it into your iBook G4 as was mentioned above since that probably will not work.

The reason I say that is that virtually all new external 2.5" harddrives out there are using SATA drives and the iBook G4s use IDE/ATA hard drives, so if you chose to go with an external enclosure/drive to clone to you would need to make sure that they are IDE/ATA parts (available at OWC, newegg.com etc).

As far as alternatives, if you have another Mac available you do have the ability to use Target Disk Mode to connect your iBook to another Mac via a FireWire cable- but again to clone a drive to that Mac it would need to have a partition on the HD set up exclusively for you or be using an external drive.

The other alternative of course is to backup your important files to DVDs or CDs then just install a new drive, format it and do a fresh OS installation and restore the files you backed up, but doing a clone is a lot easier and does not require re-installation of anything. Just make sure again that you don't accidentally wind up buying a SATA drive to replace your drive!
 
sickmacdoc said:
First off just wanted to caution you about the idea of buying a current external portable drive and cloning to it and popping it into your iBook G4 as was mentioned above since that probably will not work.

The reason I say that is that virtually all new external 2.5" harddrives out there are using SATA drives and the iBook G4s use IDE/ATA hard drives, so if you chose to go with an external enclosure/drive to clone to you would need to make sure that they are IDE/ATA parts (available at OWC, newegg.com etc).

As far as alternatives, if you have another Mac available you do have the ability to use Target Disk Mode to connect your iBook to another Mac via a FireWire cable- but again to clone a drive to that Mac it would need to have a partition on the HD set up exclusively for you or be using an external drive.

The other alternative of course is to backup your important files to DVDs or CDs then just install a new drive, format it and do a fresh OS installation and restore the files you backed up, but doing a clone is a lot easier and does not require re-installation of anything. Just make sure again that you don't accidentally wind up buying a SATA drive to replace your drive!
Click to expand...

Ok I knew that it was IDE/ATA but do you know if I can upgrade to 7200 rpm? and also do you have any good suggestions as to a specific hard drive I should buy? One that is 250 gig or bigger, if I can even go that big!
 
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