Apple

FWIW I ran a Mac Edition 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro in the MMD I had.

Well, I have the 64MB card, the basic and to my surprise, it coped with YouTube, I was rather happy with it, but as previously stated video is more CPU intensive. It does struggle a bit with some of the 3-D stuff.

Plus your card is a little more costly. .

Yeah, standard parallel IDE hard drives - also known as PATA. The front bus supports ATA-66, the rear bus I believe is ATA-133, but it might be 100 - it's faster though.
Serial ATA drives will not work in this machine (unless you add a Mac compatible SATA controller).


Yes. Shortly after I got the machine, I added a 48x Plextor Plexwriter to the lower optical bay. To make it fit, I simply removed the front of the drive's tray (it hits the rounded opening from the inside). It was not supported at the time under 10.2, so I hacked a .plist file to enable finder burning. Later versions of the OS (10.3+) support most/all third party drives no problem. I'm also now using a Sony dual layer DVD burner externally in a homemade Firewire box. That too works flawlessly, no special software required.

-Ian

I was looking into getting a SATA controller and then a nice SATA drive , would this work? I don't really know how much SATA cards are these days, a lot?


I reckon Dual Layer is a must these days, I have seen a cheap LG one, I shall implement that .

I honestly am unsure of the Mac compatibility of SATA cards. I've never tried to use one. When this machine was new, SATA was still off in the horizon. I do know that I've seen cards billed as "Mac Compatible", so I would imagine that you need one with a Mac ROM, just like you need a Mac SCSI card or a Mac IDE card. There is a chance that a common PC Silicon Image SATA card would work - but you would definitely be unable to boot from it if it did. Again, I've never tried it. If you have a friend with a PCI SATA card, you can try plugging it in and see what happens.

I did recently add two 1tb SATA drives to my machine, set up as a mirrored array. But I did it through Firewire. I bought a converter board from DatOptic - it supports two SATA disks and communicates through Firewire 800. I mounted both drives and the converter board in an old Compaq external SCSI case, and added a Firewire 800 card (cheap!) to the Mac to talk to it. It's very fast.

When adding a dual layer burner, if you add it internally, remember to get an parallel IDE one - fortunately they aren't too hard to find at the moment, but they might be getting scarce in the coming years.

-Ian

I have an old Quicksilver 2002 (no longer actively used) that's been converted to SATA. I went with a SeriTek/1VE2+2 which provides two internal and two external SATA ports and Mac firmware. It's fully bootable via SATA - I completely pulled the PATA disks aside from the optical drive.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-Black-S ... 320&sr=8-1

That fit the bill??

Looks to be IDE, I was just checking, that price seemed a little to good, also I don't think the Bezel comes off :/.

If the optical drive is to completely replace the original Superdrive, you might want to do a little research before purchase to make sure the new one will boot an install CD/DVD.

It's just so I can burn DL DVDs .

This may sound a bit dumb but, are all superdrives bootable?

I held the option key during boot and only the HDD came up as a boot device, does the Super Drive still come up even if empty?

It only appears if there is a bootable cd in it.

Looks like it should. I looked up the model number, it says it's IDE. Amazon's site sucks for useful information about products...

The bezel doesn't need to come off - just the end of the tray. I've yet to see an optical drive where the end of the tray *doesn't* come off. Just open the tray, and flip the drive over. Look at the bottom back of the tray's faceplate - they're clipped onto the tray with a two clips usually, one on each side. Just disengage the clips and slide it off.

I would install it in the lower bay and leave the original Superdrive - historically, Macs had a problem booting from non-apple drives. Personally, I've been able to boot from my external Firewire DVD drive just fine.

-Ian

Not all are - the OEM Superdrives have Apple specific firmware <or at least the PPC era Pioneer ones do>.

Also remember that in the general sense, "Superdrive" is just what Apple calls it's most capable disc burner/drive at the time. Back in the early Mac days, Apple called the 1.44mb floppy drive a Superdrive. Their first DVD burner was a Superdrive. Since then, they just call whatever DVD burner they're currently shipping "Superdrive". Outside the Mac world, everybody remembers "Superdrive" to mean the old Imation LS-120 floppy drive that also wrote to those 120mb SuperDisks.

A generic DVD burner is not a "superdrive". A DVD burner with Apple firmware is, however.

Now, all that aside, my old Superdrive won't play DVD+R discs, so to boot a burned disc on +R or +R DL media, I have to use the external DVD burner. It's not Apple at all, but it boots. The only sure fire way to see if a drive is bootable is to just try it.

-Ian

I am not going to touch the original one , I'll was intending to put it in the lower bay , all the stuff that was put in by Apple stays.

Amazon is a tool at times, I'll get one ordered soon aswell.

If the end of the tray doesn't come off, I am quite competent with a hacksaw.

Problems with usb 2.0 card. Sleeping will not work correctly anymore.

How do you mean?

My sleep mode doesn't seem to work anyway.

In mine it works. But when i put in a usb pci card and I use it, my pm doesn't stop anymore.

PM?

PowerMac

Sleep is flakey on these machines anyway - or, at least, it was in 10.2. The first peripheral I ever bought for my Mac was a USB floppy drive. After it was connected, the machine would crash every time it went into sleep. At this time, the floppy drive was the *only* piece of third party hardware connected, and the machine was under warranty. I called Apple, and explained the problem - their solution? Just plug in the floppy drive when I wanted to use it.

I disabled sleep and have never re-enabled it.

-Ian