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Powermac G5 1.8GHz DP...Will a SATA optical drive work?

lumine01

lumine01

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 23, 2008
31
1
I know the computer specs say that it uses SATA for the drive bus, and IDE for the optical drive, but is it possible to replace the IDE optical drive with a SATA (Blu-Ray) drive?

I tried searching for the answer here and elsewhere, but came up empty-handed. Thanks in advance for any help!!
 
lumine01 said:
I know the computer specs say that it uses SATA for the drive bus, and IDE for the optical drive, but is it possible to replace the IDE optical drive with a SATA (Blu-Ray) drive?

I tried searching for the answer here and elsewhere, but came up empty-handed. Thanks in advance for any help!!
Click to expand...

Yes you could as long as you run a longer SATA cable to the motherboard but you only have 2 SATA connections and those are for the hard drives so you will lose one hard drive connection. You can also always get a SATA PCI card if you need more SATA ports.

Just be aware that you can't watch commercial Blu-rays on a Mac. You can still however rip the BD discs and then watch them but I think the dual 1.8ghz might struggle with 1080p videos. My 2.5ghz quad won't even play my 1080p rips.
 
Perfect, thank you! Also, thanks for the heads-up about being able to play/watch the Blu-Rays. Fortunately, my intention is to install the new drive into my G5 in order to rip my Blu-Rays onto an external drive connected to an iMac. :) Great to hear that I can utilize the SATA already in the tower to give the Blu-Ray drive a happy home, thanks again!
 
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