iBook Clamshell IDE config questions

#1 Sat, 22 Dec 2007 - 04:51

Does the Clamshell iBook have two IDE interfaces, one for the CD and one for the HD? Also, what's the speed of the Clamshell's IDE interface?

(I've read that the chicklet iBooks have only one IDE interface, thus the question.)

If they have two interfaces, has anyone ever tried hooking a master and slave both up to the hard disk's IDE bus?

I'm thinking of an awesome Clamshell hack, using a dual-CF adaptor. One card is master, the other card is slave. This would let us put RAID in the iBook. }

Yes, the master-slave thing is bad because of the concurrency problem, but if the devices are slower than the bus by a large enough margin, it shouldn't be a big issue...

#2 Sat, 22 Dec 2007 - 05:29

According to System Profiler, there are two busses. One ATA-4 for the hard drive (aka "UDMA-33", 33 MB/s) and one ATA-3 for the optical drive (16 MB/s.)

#3 Sat, 22 Dec 2007 - 08:51

:-( That's slow. I guess you could still do RAID 1, but the CF cards are going to die less than the hard drive would anyway, so it's kinda silly.

Thanks!

#4 Sun, 23 Dec 2007 - 01:01

It may be slow by modern standards, but it is faster than hard drives were at the time.

In fact, current 5400 RPM mobile hard drives just barely exceed that speed. (The 'fast' part of the drives does, but the 'slow' part doesn't.)