[Miniryu]

My brother pointed out after seeing the G5 TV commercials that the metal grate on the front of the G5 does not have any slots to add another drive. He is being an ass to make a point, but the examples he gave are "what if I want to add a zip drive, or another optical drive so I can directly copy a disc?" He won't settle for "buy an external drive" either. What should I tell him?

[tooki]

Buy an external drive.

The G5 doesn't have bays for extra optical or zip drives. (In fact, even the MDD G4s don't have a zip bay any more...)

tooki

[Arkham_c]

Do people still use Zip drives?

Really. When you can get CDRs for less than 1¢ apiece, why not just burn a CD real quick?

The only valid reasons I have heard for a second internal drive with external access is:

1) CD-RW, so you can do disc-to-disc copies
2) Faster CD-RW, so you can burn CDs at 52x instead of 16x

Both of these are valid complaints IMHO. I don't think that (1) is a big deal for most of us, since you can make a disk image in toast on the rare occasion that the average person would do this (pirates excepted of course). (2) seems like a complaint I might have, but I don't know how fast a 16x SuperDrive burns a CDR, so I can't say. If it's 4 minutes or less, then I'll have no complaint (my $20 52x CDRW burns 700MB in about 3 minutes).

The bottom line is you have to go with an external Firewire unit if you need another media drive.