Forums | MacLife

It's not a bad machine, it's just awkward and a bit misunderstood

1. A SATA card should work fine in that machine, and drives on a PCI card are normally bootable. As far as the largest capacity drive you can connect to the built-in PATA controller, I think 128Gb is the most that controller will recognize. It's a slowww bus, though, so I would boot and runn off the SATA drive.

2. If you can get a card which has SATA, USB 2.0 and Firewire on one card, I would do it. That saves you a slot. Sonnet makes them, but Sonnet is pricey and there are other manufacturers which sell these cards, with the same quality, on the cheap. If not, just about any USB 2.0/Firewire card will work.

3. Yes. And nearly any DVD ROM drive will work, though I would get a combo drive as they're relatively cheap, or even a DVDRW. Remeber that these can be moved to newer hardware. Also, if you want DVD playback, you'll need a better graphics card. Either an ATI Rage with the DVD decoder (bare minimum, and the decoder chipset for the Yikes machines can be hard to find) or an early PCI Radeon (DVD decoding built-in). Some of the earlier PCI Radeons for Windows are easily flashed to work in a Mac, but for a machine that old, if it's only being used as a workhorse, I would just buy the cheapest Mac-ready Radeon I could find on eBay. That will give you DVD playback, Quartz-Extreme acceleration in OS X, and plenty of 2D zippyness for most apps.

Last edited by Antonio (2008-06-25 12:32 pm)

aye thanks so much antonio.  youve answered everything in detail.