I recently purchased a G5 1.8DP. First, let me gloat about how happy I am to have my very first in-the-box, current model Apple computer. I have been a Mac user for over a decade and have never been able to afford this kind of thing. Yippie!
But with the G5 comes some upgrade problems from my G4 QS tower. For generations, I have been able to swap RAM, HDDs and Video Cards from machine to machine. Not with this baby. My RAM wouldn’t work, my Audio Card wouldn’t work, and I couldn’t swap in my 120Gb drive. The one thing I could add was my Pioneer DVR-108. A faster burner than the 106 that is in there, plus it is dual layer.
But, that made me think: “Hey, this is an ATA/IDE device, that means there is an ATA bus on this board!”
ATA drives allow multiple connections (the drive bus on the G5 is SATA or Serial ATA) so why not just jump a drive? Why not indeed?! The only problem was where to put it. I saw this and noticed they put the extra drives in from of the RAM, or in the PCI slot section. These aren’t cheap (which I am) so I had to come up with something myself.
This entire project cost $5 Canadian. (I already had the drive)
UPDATE!
I just found out that there is room above the Superdrive. If you want to velcro a drive to the top of the case, or just let it rest in there, you can hook it up with even less work. Make sure your cabling isn't blocking any fans.
There is lots of room in the PCI area for drives, plus there are fans that keep that area cool. I figured I could mount the drive on a PCI card to support it. I got an ond PC PCI card from a computer junk market for free. I then took my trusty Dremel and cleaned all the copper off of it, so it would NOT be conductive and NOT short anything in the case.
I then attached the drive to the card with some zap straps.
Nice and snug.
Now on to the G5:
Removing the Superdrive is simple.
Q: How many screws does it take to get remove a G5’s Superdrive?
A: None.
Just flip these 2 levers and pull it straight out.
The ATA cable is glued to the top and you need to pull it off (not very hard). Then unplug the power and ATA from the Superdrive.
The ATA connect to the top-middle ot the board, unhook it.
The two pieces you need are an ATA power split cable and an ATA device cable with two connections:
So the power gets split into two, one for the Superdrive and one for the HDD.
Plug that in, then connect the ATA cable into the Logicboard. I would suggest getting the longest cable you can find so you have lots of room to position the HDD. It comes off of the Logicboard and one connection to the HDD, one up the back to the Superdrive.
I then plugged in the Superdrive and reinstalled it.
I attached the PCI card holding the drive to an open PCI slot. Turns out that this older card doesn’t fit into any of the PCI slots as I had hoped (to better secure it), so I positioned it to ‘rest’ on top of on of the connectors for support.
The Superdrive is the Master and the HDD is set to Slave. I didn't have to fiddle with anything as the drive was in my G4 as a Slave drive.
It was just a matter of plugging the drive in and that was that. I wish the cable wasn’t yellow, but hey... It was only $3.
Here it is all back together:
This was not very difficult. The hardest parts were cleaning off the PCI card (took a little while) and folding the cables to fit behind the Superdrive. But all together it was about 30 minutes and saved a bunch of money and got to use my old drive
