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Replacing optical drive in Performa 5400

Burgertrench

Active member
I have a black Performa 5400 Directors edition, which after a painful teardown, thorough clean and recap, was in working condition. However part way through installing the OS from a CD ROM, it seems the CD ROM drive (Matsushita CR-508-C) fried itself. No lights, won't open the tray. I removed it and cleaned the contacts, no luck. I fitted the drive in to a known good external SCSI enclosure, and it blew the enclosure fuse immediately upon power up.
I've remove the main board from the CD ROM, and don't see anything obvious wrong under a magnifier, though I'm not a technician by any stretch.
Unless anyone has some bright on how I can restore the drive, I'm now looking at replacing it. Because the Performa uses special adaptors plugged in to the SCSI and power sockets on the CD ROM drive which must align with the edge connector inside the chassis, I'm concerned I might be limited on what model drives can be fitted. Does anyone know what other drive models I can use? Or even if it's possible to fit a SCSI DVD drive?
 

Daniël

Well-known member
I might be able to check later today, so don't hold me to this yet, but I do believe the SCSI power and data connector location/spacing on the drives are standardized and should be the same across brands of drives.

As for checking what's wrong with the current drive, check for shorts across the 12V and 5V rail. Then you'd have to power the shorted rail with a small bit of current from a lab power supply, and see what gets warm. Does it use tantalum caps?
 

macuserman

Well-known member
Yeah I can confirm you can use any drive you’ll just need to transfer the adapter. So you have tons of options for replacement. I’d be more concerned about finding a color match? Not to many black ones.
 

Burgertrench

Active member
Yeah I can confirm you can use any drive you’ll just need to transfer the adapter. So you have tons of options for replacement. I’d be more concerned about finding a color match? Not to many black ones.
This is good to know. The front panel is removable so if I can get a similar one I may be able to bring it over. Failing that, I'll break out some black paint.
 

Burgertrench

Active member
I might be able to check later today, so don't hold me to this yet, but I do believe the SCSI power and data connector location/spacing on the drives are standardized and should be the same across brands of drives.

As for checking what's wrong with the current drive, check for shorts across the 12V and 5V rail. Then you'd have to power the shorted rail with a small bit of current from a lab power supply, and see what gets warm. Does it use tantalum caps?
That would be amazing if you could cross check, I don't have any other drives on hand to compare. I did a continuity test across the power pins to check for an obvious short but didn't find one, testing for heat under a small load is a good idea. Just wish I'd invested in a bench power supply and thermal camera. The board uses electrolytic caps, but I cant see any residue from them having leaked - not that that means they are ok. There is what could be some scoring on the corner of one of the chips which might be what fried, your heat test would probably prove of this was true. Might be able to jury rig something to test further.
 

CircuitBored

Well-known member
Yeah I can confirm you can use any drive you’ll just need to transfer the adapter.

This is not true. See below.

I do believe the SCSI power and data connector location/spacing on the drives are standardized and should be the same across brands of drives.
This is largely true but from my experience there is sometimes a few millimetres of variation in the spacing that completely throws off the alignment for the 5400. There's also the matter of drivers. Not all SCSI drives will "just work" in a Mac. It's best to try to find a similar drive.

There is also a third issue: the length of the drive. Optical drives come in a variety of lengths and if you don't get the right one it simply won't meet the connectors at the back of the drive slot.

The original optical drive in my black 5400 died the same way as yours. Perfect functionality one minute, sudden death the next. My fix for this was to simply steal the optical drive from another nearby (dead) Performa and swap all the plastic parts so the colours matched. It's likely that this drive will one day die too but for now "it'll do".
 
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CircuitBored

Well-known member
I have a black Performa 5400 Directors edition

I'm only asking out of curiosity: do you actually have a Director's Edition (i.e. Director's Edition is printed on the front) or is it just a black 5400? Mine is the latter and I've hardly seen any DEs in the wild at all.
 

joshc

Well-known member
There's another reason you can't use any drive because a lot of drives will be unsupported as there won't be drivers available for it. I have a SCSI CD-RW "Burn-proof" drive but can't get Toast to see it as a burner at all. It will read discs OK but it appears that for further functionality some drives need more than Mac OS's CD-ROM driver or even a third party driver like Sunrise can handle. Happy to be corrected on this but that's my experience with using non-Apple SCSI drives on Macs.
 

Burgertrench

Active member
This is not true. See below.


This is largely true but from my experience there is sometimes a few millimetres of variation in the spacing that completely throws off the alignment for the 5400. There's also the matter of drivers. Not all SCSI drives will "just work" in a Mac. It's best to try to find a similar drive.

There is also a second issue: the length of the drive. Optical drives come in a variety of lengths and if you don't get the right one it simply won't meet the connectors at the back of the drive slot.

The original optical drive in my black 5400 died the same way as yours. Perfect functionality one minute, sudden death the next. My fix for this was to simply steal the optical drive from another nearby (dead) Performa and swap all the plastic parts so the colours matched. It's likely that this drive will one day die too but for now "it'll do".
Thanks for the info - this is what I was concerned about, if it's not a standardised connector, position and chassis then I'm going to need to find a suitable model that physically matches what the machine is designed for. I've just read that some models apple uses have the power connector oriented differently within a single model depending on the drive supplier.
 

Burgertrench

Active member
There's another reason you can't use any drive because a lot of drives will be unsupported as there won't be drivers available for it. I have a SCSI CD-RW "Burn-proof" drive but can't get Toast to see it as a burner at all. It will read discs OK but it appears that for further functionality some drives need more than Mac OS's CD-ROM driver or even a third party driver like Sunrise can handle. Happy to be corrected on this but that's my experience with using non-Apple SCSI drives on Macs.
This is also worth noting, yes I really should stick to Apple sanctioned models to avoid further headaches.
 

Burgertrench

Active member
I'm only asking out of curiosity: do you actually have a Director's Edition (i.e. Director's Edition is printed on the front) or is it just a black 5400? Mine is the latter and I've hardly seen any DEs in the wild at all.
Indeed it is labelled Director's Edition with the little Director's chair on the front. These were fairly common where I am in Australia, they were just a little more expensive than the beige models.
 

macuserman

Well-known member
Sorry if I caused confusion with my earlier comment, what I mean't to say is that most of the apple drives from machines of a similar vintage will work just fine without any issues, I had a 5400 and I still have my 5500 and have swapped several drives around without issue, in fact I recently sold the 5400 to a member here and the drive in it was from my performa 575. I have a stack of drives from these older machines and so I just grab one that looks the same which they all pretty much do very few differences and then off to the races. Sorry if I oversimplified it but in my experience odds are pretty good that a drive from another mac will work just fine. I figured it was assumed that didn't include non mac specific drives as well, but I suppose I should have specified.
 

Burgertrench

Active member
Cool! I figured you must be in Australia or Southeast Asia as I don't think the 5400 DE was sold anywhere else. That's a nice historical oddity you have there.
Thanks, yes it's an interesting machine, with the various add on cards that the Performa line took I thinks it's a lot of fun. Just a shame the plastic is so brittle, it makes every operation on it risky.
 

Burgertrench

Active member
Sorry if I caused confusion with my earlier comment, what I mean't to say is that most of the apple drives from machines of a similar vintage will work just fine without any issues, I had a 5400 and I still have my 5500 and have swapped several drives around without issue, in fact I recently sold the 5400 to a member here and the drive in it was from my performa 575. I have a stack of drives from these older machines and so I just grab one that looks the same which they all pretty much do very few differences and then off to the races. Sorry if I oversimplified it but in my experience odds are pretty good that a drive from another mac will work just fine. I figured it was assumed that didn't include non mac specific drives as well, but I suppose I should have specified.
No trouble, it's still useful information to me.
 
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