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SPiNdustrious · Aug 17, 2002, 10:12 PM

Hello,

I have a Beige G3 tower with only a disk drive. Real handy in this day and age...

I want to get a cd drive and a hard drive for it.

It has internal connectors that look like SCSIs except they're narrower. Instead of 168 pins, they seem to have something on the order of 120 pins.

Is that an IDE interface cable? If I'm not giving enough info, how can I tell on my own?

I looked at internal IDE drives on www.pricewatch.com. They're very inexpensive, but will they work in my PowerMac?

Should I only invest in hardware marketed as being Mac-compatible?

Is there a more Mac-centric source that is as cheap as PriceWatch?

Sorry about all the questions. I'm still nervous about fooling around with hardware....

Thanks in advance,

Peter

oscar · Aug 17, 2002, 11:19 PM

Yup, thats ide ATA/33 to be precise. Any IDE drive will work. Anything over 120 gigs or so, you'll need a ATA/133 card. The only mac compatible device you need to look for is the afrementioned ATA card.

SPiNdustrious · Aug 18, 2002, 06:07 PM

Hmmm, I'm getting a clearer idea, but I'm still puzzled.

My PC haxor buddy tells me ATA comes in three speeds: 33, 66, 100 and 133.

So, from oscars comments, I'm guessing my G3 has an ata/33 bus that will accomodate everything except ata/133 devices.

If I want to use ata/133 devices, I'll need a mac-compatible pci card that'll add an ata/133 bus.

Can someone confirm/correct this?

Thanks,

Peter

tenchi71 · Aug 18, 2002, 06:51 PM

Nope. He said:

Originally posted by oscar:
Any IDE drive will work. Anything over 120 gigs or so, you'll need a ATA/133 card.

All ATA/133 Drives are backwards compatible. They will run at the slower speeds (ie ATA/33/66/100). The problem lies in the size of the drive. Like he said, anything over 120GB you will need an ATA/133 PCI card. Actually, you may want to get a card anyway, since then you'll be taking advantage of the speed boost (from 33mhz to 133mhz). That's what I would do....

BTW... I'm an Oscar too

eep! · Aug 18, 2002, 08:42 PM

http://www.everymac.com/systems/appl...g3_233_mt.html
might give you more info than you already have re: your comp.
I think E-IDE was 33Mb/sec? not sure, I think it's what's in my pentium.

olePigeon · Aug 18, 2002, 09:36 PM

Originally posted by SPiNdustrious:
My PC haxor buddy tells me ATA comes in three speeds: 33, 66, 100 and 133.

LOL. With logic like that, I doubt he couldn't hack his way out of a wet paper bag.

By the way, Beige G3s have a SCSI and 2 IDE. A very important warning (you can kill a HD by doing this) only Rev B G3s and higher support master/slave. If you have a Rev A G3 (233 or 266) you can only allocate ONE drive for each IDE port. Trying to slave on those will kill a HDD, I know cuz I went through two of them before someone pointed this out to me. Luckily Fry's Electronics doesn't give a rats ass and let me exchange them.

An example config: my 233 G3 has 80GB HDD on one IDE and my 24x CD-ROM on the other. Then I have a Zip 100 on my SCSI chain.

drjoe · Aug 19, 2002, 03:11 AM

[QUOTE]Originally posted by olePigeon:
[B]

LOL. With logic like that, I doubt he couldn't hack his way out of a wet paper bag.

By the way, Beige G3s have a SCSI and 2 IDE. A very important warning (you can kill a HD by doing this) only Rev B G3s and higher support master/slave. If you have a Rev A G3 (233 or 266) you can only allocate ONE drive for each IDE port. Trying to slave on those will kill a HDD,

Well, if you say you killed two of them, then you killed ywo of them. But whatever it was it wasn't putting two drives on the IDE bus that killed 'em. It is true that the Rev A G3DTs don't support slave drives in OS9 et al but in OSX the installation patches the roms and the IDE buses support both master/slave. I sit here right now with two drives on the A bus, an IBM deskstar 45 gig and the original WD 4 gig. Only the master position can boot though.

tooki · Aug 19, 2002, 04:38 AM

Originally posted by SPiNdustrious:
...It has internal connectors that look like SCSIs except they're narrower. Instead of 168 pins, they seem to have something on the order of 120 pins...

The internal standard SCSI connector is 50 pins and 2.5" wide (wide SCSI is 68, but with a very different connector), IDE is a 40-pin connector 2" wide (although the cable may use 40 or 80 wires, depending on the speed).

tooki

iSilver · Aug 19, 2002, 08:13 AM

i had to replace the factory CD player in my G3 and i did so with a $20 Sony IDE CD player which worked fine, except Apple CD Player didn't like it and refused to control the player.

SPiNdustrious · Aug 19, 2002, 01:02 PM

Sweet! Thanks for the tips and the warnings and the helpful explanations.

Come payday and I'll have a nice new server!

I thought newsgroups were helpful until I found MacNN.

Thanks,

Peter

Retrograde · Aug 20, 2002, 03:00 PM

Originally posted by drjoe:

Well, if you say you killed two of them, then you killed ywo of them. But whatever it was it wasn't putting two drives on the IDE bus that killed 'em. It is true that the Rev A G3DTs don't support slave drives in OS9 et al but in OSX the installation patches the roms and the IDE buses support both master/slave. I sit here right now with two drives on the A bus, an IBM deskstar 45 gig and the original WD 4 gig. Only the master position can boot though.

This is just a shot in the dark, but if the Rev A beige G3s have their roms patched by an OSX installation could an unpatched rom be the reason why many people are reporting problems installing jaguar on these early beige G3s?

Specifically, they cannot get the cdrom drive to recognise or properly mount the install cd. Does the lack of slave drive support mess with the way the jaguar install disk views (or not in this case) the CD drive?

Retrograde · Aug 20, 2002, 03:07 PM

Originally posted by drjoe:
I sit here right now with two drives on the A bus, an IBM deskstar 45 gig and the original WD 4 gig. Only the master position can boot though.

...or, come to think of it, if the rom has been patched like yours is and because of this you cannot boot from the slave drive could this be causing the problem: ie, the CD drive has been listed as the slave and now will not boot the install disk?

I should stop now as this speculation is spewing straight from you know where!

Any thoughts on this would be great though

almaink · Aug 22, 2002, 11:02 AM

We may be getting off topic here but I just read that IDE drives in 10.2 need to be set to cable select to work.

tenchi71 · Aug 22, 2002, 03:44 PM

Originally posted by almaink:
We may be getting off topic here but I just read that IDE drives in 10.2 need to be set to cable select to work.

Nope. Mine are set as master/slave. It's the new PM's that have to be set to cable select.