Original iMac G3 Bondi CF/SD Slot Mod

[gocarlo]

Do you think it would be possible to install an SD or CF card reader in the side panel of the original 1998 RevA iMac G3? See attached photo for reference. My intention is to use it as convenient removeable media without relying on the slow USB 1.1 ports.

I imagine connecting it by extending the IDE ribbon cable and Molex power cable, or if that’s not possible. If space doesn’t allow for this mod, I would consider removing the original HDD to make room, and perhaps rely on the SD/CF hard as primary HD (and would have the added benefit being easily removable).

 

[360alaska]

I can confirm that the IDE bus (in REV B) will support two drives. At one point (in 2004) my 266 mhz IMAC G3's analog board went out and I converted it into an ATX case.

 

[Brett B.]

Sure it's possible and I think there's plenty of room there - although I'm not sure how feasible using an IDE->CF/SD adapter would be.  Wouldn't be hot swappable, would it?  And I don't recall exactly how the IDE bus is configured on those.  It may be that the hard drive and CD-ROM are on the same channel but I'm not near my iMac to confirm that.

I suppose it would be possible to install a USB CF/SD card reader there but then you're back to the slow USB issue but you could at least hot swap cards.

This does beg the question though, if speed is the main concern for file transfers here, why not simply use ethernet?

 

[Cory5412]

IDE CF adapters exist, and SD adapters almost certainly exist, but I'm willing to bet they are not actually hot-swappable, so that's definitely something to consider.

USB would be more flexible, IME USB 1.1 is "good enough" on vintage machines because, well, I have other computers and so if a file transfer is big enough, I just go do something else. Also, you can use a multi-card reader if you'd like, though you probably don't want to try too many file transfers at once.

But yeah: it will probably be even faster to transfer files with ethernet, if possible.

 

[gocarlo]

Thank you everyone, this is helpful. Is the 10/100 Ethernet connection faster than IDE?

One of the goals is to replace the HDD with something silent and fast. Got me thinking that it might be good to use SD/CF. And then it got me thinking that it would be cool to make the SD/CF card easily accessible/removable without disassembling the machine.

I’ve also fantasized about replacing the insides of the iMac with the guts of an intel Mac mini, relying on the original built in display, and extending the Mini’s ports to fit in the existing opening of the iMac’s side port bezel and mezzanine panel.

 

[Cory5412]

The iMac would be a suitable machine to do such a modification to, because the display is mostly separated from the computer. It's got a Mac-style DB-15 connector, but it's multisync so a VGA adapter as you can use on the multisync monitors should work, but it's such a nice machine as it is.

For hdd-like operations where you don't intend to swap the card while the machine is on, IDE to SD/CF will be fine enough, but in general, 10/100 network can be faster than ATA-66, but i/o (both local disk and network) is a weakness of Classic Mac OS, so I don't know if you'll notice it. If you wanted to boot from CF/SD anyway, USB wouldn't work for the original iMac. (though: some later G3/G4s can boot OS9 from USB.)

That said.... interesting thought, I think you can netboot the original iMac, so if you had a fast-ish OS X server with really good storage (like, a good G4 or a G5 with a SATA SSD) netbooting an iMac might be a little faster than the local disk. It would probably break down once you started wanting to do other network tasks with the machine as well.

 

[gocarlo]

Ahh yeah, NetBoot! Great idea. I wish I had thought of that years ago. It should work with any NewWorld ROM Mac. It’s gonna be fun to experiment with some of these different configurations. Thank you!