Macintosh IDE CD/CD-R question

[MTAtech]

I've got an old Mac 8500. A couple of years ago I added a card that allows IDE hard disks because IDE disks are cheap compared to SCSI disks and I had IDE hard disks laying around anyway. Now, the original CD-ROM (SCSI) is failing and I'm wondering if I can replace it with a IDE CD or CD-R and connect it to the 2nd channel on the IDE card.

[Undeadlord]

Not sure exactly, becuase I don't know what card you put in there. But usually a card which allowes IDE is just a another IDE controller on a card. So you should be able to add anything you could hook to a normal IDE. Hope that helps.

Undeadlord

[MTAtech]

It's a Sonnet ATA/66 card.

[daveleau]

Add up to 4 internal ATA/IDE hard drives

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/tempo.html

Most controller cards support hard drives only. It appears this one is the same. I have actually never TRIED to put a cd-rom or dvd on a controller, even though I had one in my PC. (I also used a VST controller card in my Mac 7300 before, but never tried cd on it either)

If you have an extra one lying around, it cannot hurt to try it, but I doubt it will work.

If you search www.pricewatch.com in JUST THE CD-ROM AREA, you will find SCSI CD-rom drives fairly inexpensive (2x for $8, 12x for $13)

Be sure to reference the pricewatch store at www.resellerratings.com to see if it is reputable.

Good luck
Dave

[MTAtech]

Good suggestion. I might as well replace it with a SCSI drive since they are so cheap. I can do the whole thing for less than $20 and get more performance than the original 2X drive.

BTW, I find it amazing that this 1995 vintage computer is still usable with just a few inexpensive upgrades (I upgraded the 120 MHz CPU to 200, added the IDE card and a 40GB drive and boosted the memory to 256MB. I'm upgrading the video to voodoo 3 soon). I have two other Win PCs and a server with this Mac on the network. It obviously can't win a race with my Athlon PC but it's still quite usable.