MrFahrenheit
Well-known member
Well, I did some surgery on the drive cage and ripped off the metal backplate that’s 3 inches wide and 1/2 inch high covering the IDE port of my Fujitsu 1.3GB MO. I’ve successfully set it to slave and it’s on the bus with the DVDR drive. I now have, on one single machine:Bernoulli had a second generation in the late '80s and early '90s. It co-existed with Zip for a couple years, and got up to 230 meg capacity in a smaller 5.25-inch size. It's hypothetically nearly as reliable as MO because it (as with MO) has an arrangement where the r/w head doesn't touch the physical storage media.
Though, I've found it's impractical to get running at this point.
To the points about DVD and LD - success and popularity are different things and that was my point. LD was a success because it sold loads of copies over 20 years, even though it wasn't more popular, for the cost and convenience reasons you mentioned.
Recognizing this kind of thing is a rampant problem in vintage-anything. We have this discussion once in a while on this very forum even. A lot of people mistake the popularity of Zip as a sign of failure on the part of all the other options in this market, even ones that lasted longer, were popular everywhere else, or found success in specific markets (like MO and medical imaging and archival) (Unfortunately, the devices having found use in those specific markets is probably part of why they're harder to get in the US -- but MO was popular for home and office use in Japan, so Japan and buying/shipping services therein can be a good resource for MO media.
There were a few JDM kits for the blue-white and various Power Mac G4s, but I suspect the more popular options here were to use USB, use Firewire, or add a SCSI card and use that. Unfortunately, I don't know if going and getting one of those is worthwhile per se because they're not ultra-common even in Japan. You have to either know what you're looking for or accident your way into it, which'll be turbo-expensive for people living in North America.
What's your specific use case for the drive in the G4? Is it just making/transferring data (where USB/FW will be fine) or are you looking into making G4-appropriate restore media that'll need to be booted from?
To be honest, I'm tempted to say DVD-R or CD-R based media is better fit for booting a G3/G4, especially since IIRC these machines are often reputed to work fine with newer SATA based optical drives using something like a SIL3112.
Though, like, in general I do know/get that it's nicer to have the drives be internal when you can. In that case, the only thing I can think of is keep looking for different drives that are set up with their connectors where you need them.
Beyond a certain point (uni-north, I believe, is that point) you can boot USB on some newworld systems (iBook and one of the early ish G4s but not the yikes, some later iMac G3s, the pismo, all PowerBook G4s, that kind of thing) and while it is slow it does work so in theory you can just keep a, like, 32-gig USB stick around for restoring those machines as well.
- SATA Card with 2TB SATA hard drive
- New Apple Original DVDR SuperDrive
- USB Zip 100Mb drive
- Adaptec SCSI Card with:
- Iomega Jaz 1GB SCSI
- Fujitsu 1.3GB ATAPI MO Drive
I can use this machine to backup and restore from and to any of these media. Additionally it’s connected to my NAS which supports AppleShare, with 16TB of storage space.
The G4 can boot Mac OS 9 or OS X 10.4.11, and download from the internet directly using TenFourFox, or access files I’ve downloaded from my Windows 10 PC to the NAS. All of my CDs are imaged onto the NAS and I can burn a CD, or write the contents of a CD to any one of Zip, Jaz, or MO and use on any one of a Mac SE through the G4 even.
This is the ultimate in bridging. I realize I don’t have a floppy drive. Don’t fret, I’ve got many 68k Macs with floppy drives, I just copy the disk images using another media and access on the Mac I want to make floppies on.
I also have SCSI external Zip, Jaz, CD (and a Yamaha CDR) and MO drives and can easily move data back and forth with great ease.
I’d also get into the other formats but... this is quite enough. 100mb on Zip is a convenient size for the cost (new sealed disks about $1.5-$2 each). MO is great for making installer media and such. Easily rewritable and cost of between $0.003 and $0.008 per megabyte (depending on size used). It seems faster than Zip, but slower than Jaz. Jaz 1GB is great for capacity, speed, and reasonable cost. 3 packs of 1GB cartridges are about $15, or $5 a cartridge. Right in the middle of cost per MB of MO. They’re not as reliable as MO, but they’re freaking fast. Faster than most of my internal hard drives. Faster than SCSI2SD in most of my tests.
On my test bench I have a keyboard and mouse, a monitor, and a stack of Jaz, Zip, and MO external drives all daisy chained. I connect a Mac I want to test or use to the setup and boot whatever media and OS version I want. Last night I played MYST on an LC475, which I copied over to a 640mb MO disk to try. It worked great. That’s my use case. Just moving data and having fun with it at the same time.