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Hardware

Buying an IDE burner- for the iMac? 26

Posted by Cliff from the iBurner dept.
danboid asks: "I'm going to buy an 'internal' IDE burner for my iMac (revision A- I have to open it up and lead an IDE cable out and buy a power supply for it though!) so I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations or could tell me what to look out for or avoid. I will probably be burning under Linux but I'd like to get a burning program for Mac OS X- has anybody had any experience with such a setup?"
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Buying an IDE burner- for the iMac? More

Buying an IDE burner- for the iMac?

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  • And what is wrong with a Firewire burner? Or an external burner? After all, isn't that the draw of an iMac? Basics in a convenient case, with lots of plugs to connect external devices. Old iMac, or new? Old iMac might require that you use USB instead of Firewire if you are to go the external route.

    Some more information would be helpful as to the choice of path you are planning to take. If it is just for a 'l33t case mod' then I think you are on your own.

    • revision A does not have Firewire, they only have USB.
    • RTFM.

      ...my iMac (revision A...

      The Rev A iMac doesn't have FireWire ports. Unless you know something we don't, FireWire isn't an option.

      For external options, there's SCSI and USB left. USB sucks really hard for CD-RW drives. My girlfriend bought a QPS Que! drive for her Rev B iMac. Besides being a horrible company, their drive is shit too, but some of that I fear has something to do with the speed of USB.

      SCSI may be an option, see this [theimac.com]. I'm not sure how easy these SCSI cards for the mezzanine slot in the Rev A and B iMacs are to come around anymore. My girlfriend has a Voodoo2 in her iMac and it works great. A USB-SCSI converter wouldn't be advisable.

      I've seen an *internal* iMac CD-RW model or two, but they were pretty spendy. I'm told they they were kind of flaky too. I think your best bet would be to have an external enclosure.

      • Re:iMac -- Firewire (Score:2, Informative)

        by beerits ( 87148 )
        Your right a Rev A iMac doesn't have firewire out of the box but it is an option with this card [sonnettech.com]
      • Besides being a horrible company, their drive is shit too, but some of that I fear has something to do with the speed of USB.

        It probably does. I've got the QPS Que!Fire drive on my iMac here, and it works like a champ. Not a single coaster yet, and the Apple stuff (iTunes, for instance) supports it as well.

        --saint
      • I have to agree with the above reply. I've been using a QPS firewire 12x10x32 for almost a year now and it really kicks ass. I've also heard that USB burners suck across the board. Does your iMac have PCI slots? Maybe you can get a firewire card?

        Incidentally, I hear that when you're burning at faster speeds, the pits get burned with less definition, so they're more prone to errors and degradation over time. So I'm glad I didn't spend more money on a faster drive. Because of this, I usually burn at 4x or 8x these days. For audio CDs, they'll stil sound alright if there's errors, since CD players can compensate. Here's a quote from a Q&A in "Keyboard" magazine:

        "I've found that I can burn at 4x without any problems, but I make sure I've allocated the maximum amount of memory to the burning software's RAM cache (64MB in the case of Toast)."
  • Your best bet for a burner is an external burner, there a bit more expensive then the internal ones but just go down a bit in speed to cominsate for the price!

    • Re:Extrenal (Score:3, Informative)

      by ivan256 ( 17499 )
      I disagree. USB burners suck big time. If he doesn't care about asthetics, the IDE burner is the way to go. If he doesn't care about MacOS compatability, almost any IDE burner will work. The IDE burner support in linux is excelent. With third party drivers he should also be able to get almost any IDE burner to work in MacOS 9.x. I haven't tried it in MacOS X yet...

      USB is only 12Mbit. While that's plenty for lots of things, it's not good for data storage. He'll likely only get 1.4MB/sec MAX, and with that upper limit, it's only safe to burn at 4x or slower. Lame.
      • You're assuming that USB 1.0 is the only external protocol available. Many Macs have IEEE1394 (Firewire) and USB 2.0 is available. Both are in excess of 400Mbps, plenty of speed for burning.

  • Check xlr8yourmac.com... (Score:4, Informative)

    by catseye ( 96076 ) on Saturday April 20, 2002 @05:03PM (#3380536)
    Probably the best reference on the 'net for hacking your Mac is xlr8yourmac.com [xlr8yourmac.com]. For your little project, you'll probably want to check out the drive compatibility database [xlr8yourmac.com]. Do a search for "CDRW", "IDE" and "iMac" as computer type -- when I tried it, I got 18 hits from other people who had done something similar to you.

    Of course, you didn't indicate whether you have one of the original iMacs or a slot-loading model, but it should be possible in either case.

    Good luck!

    -A.

    • Yes he did indicate. Revision A.
      • -1, Poor Reading Skills for me, then.

        If anything, though, that should make it easier for the poster if he changes his mind and decides to put the drive in the case instead of snaking cables out the side. The Rev. A's CD-ROM was just a standard laptop drive, pretty common form factor these days for all sorts of CD flavors (-RW, DVD-ROM, DVD/CDRW, etc.)

        -A.

    • Thank you! That was the link I wanted!

      Where do I get one of those Y-cable HD power splitter cables from though?
      • Most any store that carries random computer parts (CompUSA, Fry's, etc.) should have them. Heck, if you have a local Ma and Pa computer shop (the sort of place that builds generic PC boxen) in town, go there and ask nicely -- they may even give you one. Those power splitters are pretty common in the PC world.

        -A.
  • Any yamaha CD burner gets my kudos. I have two of them.
  • I'm sorry this sounds bad, but if you haven't heard of xlr8yourmac.com, I have to doubt your skillz. Not that I can say anything, as the only mod I've done is to a B&W G3 (actually, it was also adding a CD-RW - in the zip drive slot), but that is significantly easier to work on that an iMac - remember that's not a full-size CD drive you've got there, it's one from a laptop, so you're probably going to have to cut/move some stuff. It might not even be possible without major EE-type stuff.

    Not that you can't do it, but consider getting an external (Firewire!), that way you can burn CD-to-CD and rip even faster in iTunes. Plus, when you dump your iMac, you've still got a useful CD-RW - check out dealmac.com [dealmac.com] for good daily prices

    • Re:No offense, but... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by KurdtX ( 207196 )
      Well, it seems I need to check my facts [apple.com] before blabbing, huh?

      Don't go for USB, it's not worth it. But do check eveything out before you start cutting, I spent 10+ hours of research and 4 hours of work for my simple mod.
  • For those that never passed reading-for-comprehension the person states they're running an iMac rev. A.

    This is the original iMac: Bondi Blue, 233 MHz, 2MB Rage+ video, mezzanine slot that was never used, really evil origami-style assembly.

    To run MacOS X on this is, well, it's doable but it is painful. I bought MacOS X for my rev. B (same but with 6 MB video RAM) and finally scrubbed it off as too slow to be practical on this 4 year old hardware. Apparently you're a more patient person then I.

    You're going to have to run the IDE cable off of the same bus the existing hard drive is on, chop a hole in the case to feed it out. Then you're going to have to find a compatible burner, trick it out it in a case of some sort (nekked electronics often come to bad ends) as well as that power supply. Now comes the problem of getting everything recognized...

    My advice would be forget creating a Frankenstein-machine and move up to a machine that comes with it. Or go USB.

    1. Apple is still selling the CRT iMacs at a good price. You can find older models for sale in lots of places online, particularly as kids who got them as they entered college graduate. With selling your existing model the cost of an iMac with native burning would almost certainly be less then cutting open your current one and hanging a lot of hardware off of it.

    2. Or were you for some reason bound & determined not to replace your current iMac (all of your accessories match or something) then a USB burner would seem to be a good alternative. They're fairly well supported, if you get a USB 1.1/USB 2 one you'll be set for the future, a USB/FireWire and you'll be golden. Thus when you do break down and upgrade this'll be no huhu, indeed you can even lend it out to friends & family, share it between machines.

    It's your call, but unless you're going for some bragging rights on iMac hardware hacking hanging an IDE burner off it seems the longer, harder, more expensive, and likely far more frustrating alternative then the other two.

  • Why must everyone slam stuff that may not be the fastest? I mean like speedy stuff too, but sometimes USB would be fine. You don't need a real speedy bus to run a CD-RW. Also, on his hardware, it probably doesn't matter anyway. To me, it wouldn't be worth tearing apart a old iMac to add a CD-RW and quite possibly break something. It would be very hard to fix this. It's not like you can go out and by a new MB for these things.

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