Scavenging G4 innards - DVD and 120GB drive

[sotied]

I've been using my iBook as my primary machine for about 18 months now and I'm looking very seriously about grabbing one of the last PowerBooks because I'm not ready (from a software perspective) to upgrade to Intel and Universal.

That said, I'm trying to take what I need from my G4 tower and use it to support my iBook, my iTunes, my photos, etc.

In the G4 (stay with me, it will be clear in a second) is a DVD burner and two hard drives. The drives are a 60Gb and a 120GB. The 60 will stay with the tower, the DVD burner and the 120 drive are coming out for me to play with.

1 - HOW easy is it for me to find AND INSTALL the DVD burner into an enclosure? Or is it better to just find an external burner as speeds are going up and the PowerBook I'm looking at already has a SuperDrive.

2 - The 120GB drive is an ATA protocol. What are my options as far as enclosures go? I'd like to get a firewire enclosure, but I can't find any. And USB 1.1 is too slow to use the drive as my back-up drive (I think, correct me if I'm mistaken).

3 - Finally, if I'm just looking to give someone a good deal on the G4 (ram is up at 1.5GB and it's in great shape; should I just leave the stuff in it and use the money from the sale to get a new IDE internal and enclosure as well as a DVD burner (external)?

Thanks for your help.

Jeff

 

[frankblundt]

seling the G4 would be easier with the dvd left in. i'd take the 120 tho

DVD drives are dead cheap now and a lot better/faster than what's in the machine most likely.

i don't know why you can't find a firewire enclosure, there's millions around - here's a review (from Boston) of a CP one.

Most of them are ATA enclosures (it's actually a little more difficult to find SATA ones), but try and get one that's ATA-6 compatible so that if you get a drive bigger than 120 in the future it will work with it (non ATA-6 enclosures will still work with larger drives but you won't be able to use/format/see more than 137GB)

DVD encloures are easy to install, just make sure it's the right size! (usually 5 1/2 " as opposed to 3.5 for drive enclosures, or 2.5 for notebook drives)

My experience with pricing indicates that including extras rarely gets you a better price. You'd be better off taking it down to a "reasonable" spec - the one drive and 512MB-1GB RAM and sell the other bits separately if you don't want them.

 

[sotied]

Thanks - makes sense

I did a little more research after posting and you're right...I should probably leave the drive in the tower and just take out the drive.

I also found out - and correct me if this is errant - that my ATA drive is essentially the same as an IDE drive. Therefore it is MUCH easier to find enclosures for it. The trouble I was having was that all ATA/Firewire enclosures were listed as SATA and they were RAID setups that were hundreds of bucks.

Now, I've found a bunch of USB/Firewire IDE enclosures for around $40.

Thanks,

Jeff

 

[frankblundt]

yeah - it is IDE - i'm not up on the technical side but there's basically SCSI and IDE for "kinds" of drives. Pre-G3 Apple was all SCSI, now they're all IDE (unless you got a custom build).

On the IDE side ATA has changed many times over the years with faster transfer speeds ATA66 ATA100 ATA 133.., SATA is the latest and uses a different cable connector and controller to all the rest (Apple only moved to SATA with the G5)

Any old IDE enclosure will do you but like i said, make sure it has "big" drive support (they don't always list this as ATA-6) for future expansion.