Avalon said:
Those old PowerMacs use SCSI for internal drives, instead of IDE. So mainly what you need to find is a CD burner with a SCSI interface, which won't be too easy.
USB 1 is way too slow for CD burning, and you probably won't find an external one that can use USB 1. And a USB 2 card won't work either, as it's not supported with anything less than Mac OS X (not even OS9).
USB 1.1 should work, 8x being the theoretical upper limit on USB 1.1 and 4x (600KB/s burning) being realistic.
The 7500 has the same SCSI config as the 8500 I have here, externally that will do 5MB/s (faster than USB 1.1) so what you need ideally is an external SCSI drive which has a 25pin D sub connector to a 50pin Centronics connector probably and the SCSI drive in an external enclosure.
You could alternatively replace the internal SCSI CD-ROM with a SCSI CDRW drive - that would work absolutely fine so long as you set the SCSI ID to one that is not in use (generally ID 3 is a safe bet..).
The SCSI ID basically defines the device number on the chain, which can be an ID between 0 and 6 (so a total of 7 devices on one SCSi chain).
To replace the internal drive is easy. BAsically just a simple straight swap.
if you need to keep the internal CD-ROM e,g: as a source to burn from, then the external route is the way to go, prefrably an external SCSi drive as they will run faster than on the USB 1.1 bus.
Alternatively, Sonnet make a IDE-ATA 133 card which allow you to replace internal drives with inexpensive IDE devices.
I have acquired a Power macintosh 7500 and 8500 this weekend, the 7500 is doing nothing and the 8500 has been set up to replace the 7200/90. Either way, don't sling out the 7500 - it's quite expandable.
Vicky :flower:
