First Pwbooks w/internal CD Drive...Which kind of interface?

[neptuno1979]

Hi everyone, newbie to the 68kmla, and have one question regarding early Powerbooks with internal CD-Drive; I realize that first Powerbooks with CD-Rom weren't 68k-powered, instead they were PowerPC-based (Powerbook 1400 and 3400, according to Wikipedia). Unfortunately, I haven't any experiencies with them, so would like to start finding out.....

Does anybody could tell me which kind of interface was used on the first Powerbooks with internal CD-ROM drive?....Was it SCSI? Could anybody bear out this? I've been googlin' about it, but still can't find the answer...

I have this thought since I've seen that a SCSI Laptop-style Hard drive was used on the old world Powerbooks, but still haven't got any old PB in order to bear out this....

WIlling to know more info, Hopefully anyone could give a more detailed explanation regarding this topic,

Thankx Please keep posting....

 

[Byrd]

They are ATAPI (IDE) based, but around this time their interface wasn't a soild standard - pinouts and dimensions of the drives themselves varied quite a bit. Most ATAPI drives of this era have a custom harness and connector to the motherboard itself. Then again, ATAPI/IDE drives still do have similar issues to this day in terms of dimensions and pinouts (slave/master/CS select also needing checking).

You can replace the drives with the right model (sometimes to a faster model), recalling the stock PB1400 12X drive could be sent in a spin with the installation of a 24X model.

JB

 

[LCGuy]

Byrd's right - electrically they are all ATAPI drives. However, not all drives are physically ATAPI drives. While 3400 drives are electrically IDE, and show up on an IDE bus, they use a proprietary connector which cannot be adapted to a standard notebook ATAPI interface unless you find the very rare MCE expansion bay module.

PowerBook 1400 6x and 8x drives use a notebook IDE hard drive connector. With an L shaped connector a sled from a 6x or 8x drive can be converted into a hard drive expansion bay module. Alternatively, there are some non-Teac, non-Apple drives that used this connector. I have a Hitachi 24x unit from a ThinkPad that uses the same connector, just plugs straight into the interface board. Have fun getting a 3rd party IDE drive to work in OS 9 though.

As Byrd said, PowerBook 1400 12x drives are really your best candidate for upgrades - they use a standard Micro-50 notebook ATAPI connector like 95% of drives out there.

For what its worth, no PowerBook ever used an internal SCSI CD-ROM drive, not only were there no SCSI notebook CD-ROM drives in the first place, but on top of that Apple had phased out PowerBook SCSI drives with the discontinuation of the PowerBook 500 series. Also, here is a page with some interesting info on various PowerBook expansion bay modules.

 

[Franklinstein]

^^As they said, all of these drives are electrically IDE/ATAPI, but only the 1400 used any sort of a standard connector. Every other PowerBook until the Lombard/iBook used a custom internal connector (usually a ribbon cable) to connect the drive to the PB module interface board. Everything after used the same relatively standard connector; the problem was finding a drive that would cooperate with the signalling used by the computer (specifically bus mastering), and with a similar faceplate (where required). I've had no success in swapping a Teac or Samsung drive into a Lombard/Pismo module, but Matsushitas usually work.

 

[Bunsen]

http://home.comcast.net/~macdan/ebms.html