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Superdrive replacement for a G4 iMac

G

gooser

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 4, 2013
514
51
having trouble finding one of these however i have no trouble finding a new combo drive. the combo drive is 16x10x40. will this work? the drive it's replacing is a 8x8x24 and burns dvd's at 1x. as long as this thing will read dvd's and burn cd's i can live without the burning of dvd's. any opinions? i think i can figure out what the 16x10x40 means but can someone translate it for me?
 
it states that it is ide. same thing, right? since i posted i've found a faster one made by buslink.
 
Most any IDE/PATA 5 1/4" optical drive will work in an iMac G4. As with many Macs-depending on the exact configuration of the drive and the computer-you may need to remove the front cover from the tray to get it to open and close correctly in the computer. This is relatively minor surgery.
 
1 thing

any normal "short length" one should work just be ready to remove the front door of the tray as it may catch on the drop down door of the iMac. mine did so i had to.
 
i haven't bought the optical drive yet but today i ordered a replacement hard drive for the imac. ssd drive. and this will be an os9 computer. should be an interesting upgrade project.
 
The only thing to research is noise levels as iMacs tend to amplify those coming from the optical drive. Some drives perform well with just a whoosh, others sound like a washing machine on a spin cycle. That can get old pretty quickly.
 
It would work, if it fits and has the jumpers set correctly. I don't know of any LightScribe software that will work with PowerPC Macs.
 
I put a Lightscribe drive in an MDD the other day...it was just what I happened to pick up out of my parts box. It worked fine as a DVD reader/writer.
 
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