Swapping out an optical drive for a hard disk drive to gain extra storage is a sensible way to upgrade your ‘Book if you’re not at all using optical media anymore. Especially if the benefits of storing a ton of stuff on local storage far outweighs the benefits of keeping a SuperDrive or Combo Drive in there for the off chance you’ll use it. The idea was sparked since the 1.25 PowerBook 15″ I had was just receiving spare parts and upgrades, and this ODD to HDD converter was a $7 leftover from a prior project I found. Of course, the DVD drive isn’t going anywhere – it won’t be tossed and may be put back into the PowerBook in the future. Optical drives and media are becoming increasingly scarce as time goes on, no sense in tossing something perfectly functional.
What can you do with 1 TB in a PowerBook G4?
Store a lot more games and apps than was previously possible. Particularly if you wanna squeeze Virtual Machines onto the PowerPC Mac through Virtual PC 7 or QEMU, alongside GameCube ROMs, the whole Photoshop Suite, having breathing room for more partitions and plain having more breathing room overall. 1 TB drives are abundant nowadays, why not?
Drive and adapter used
Fitting the Hard Drive to the adapter
Before removing the ODD
After installing the HDD
Powering it on
Effects so far
Finally I could offload the Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 VPV7 VMs off the tiny 64 GB SSD and onto the 1 TB Hard Drive. Now there’s tons of space for many different possible OSes! Saved 22 GB off the tiny SSD.
In Conclusion
Whether it’s a PowerPC ‘Book or an Intel one, the optical drive bay allows for some extra storage if you’re willing to do without optical media. The choice can be a bit divisive.. taking away a core functionality of a computer yet taking advantage of the potential offered by another ATA/SATA connection. At the end of the day it’s about getting the most out of your Apple gear and upgrading as necessary or desired.
Future projects with this ‘Book…
Looking at how dark the keyboard is.. I can already tell what needs to be tackled next. The pictures give it more light than what actually shows!
