quinterro
Well-known member
I removed all outer plastic parts from the case, and there was some hair and dust. Most of it was near the air intake holes on the front panel and behind the optical bay fan, but eww .If you remove the outer plastic side panels, you might find a disgusting amount of hair and dust wedged between the panel and inner metal case, blocking airflow in from the bottom. As others have said, the MDDs are noisy. Mine was marginally less sporadic with the fan RPMs once I thoroughly cleaned the case. It might also be worth a peek into the PSU to see how much junk is insulating the parts that want to radiate their heat away.
I have not checked recently but there has been a seller on eBay with SATA IDE cards with the right Silicon Image chip to work on these. I am shocked at how fast a good Samsung SATA SSD is on on these machines. One version with 2 SATA ports will support OS 9 and the one with 4 is 10.x only. An AirPort Extreme card will connect to contemporary Wifi.
USB 2.0 PCI cards also work well and improve the experience. Enjoy the MDD!
I bought a StarLink SATA to IDE adapter instead of a SATA PCI card. Given how small 2.5" SATA drives are, there was plenty of room for the adapter to be installed.
Somewhere in my office I have two USB 2.0 cards - one has USB 2 and FireWire with an Ali chipset, the other just has USB 2 with a NEC chipset. I know where the combo card is, but I also remember once installed there is a gap between the card bracket and the slot's screw hole. The NEC card didn't have this issue.
Not knowing if the optical drive worked, I cloned a Tiger install from my iBook G4 1.33ghz. It booted, but reported the processor as a 1ghz G4. This could be due to the replacement logic board not being the same as the original - I think it is from an older MDD. I burned a DVD+R disc of 10.4 to install. The MDD booted the disc slowly, then flaked out after formatting the SSD and partially installing Tiger. After that the text on the install dialog was garbled.
The original 80GB drive still boots, but some of the apps appear to be corrupted like Disk Utility. The icon is missing and the app won't start when double-clicked.