so at this point whats your options
1) internal drive + controller card

2) firewire drive, which is proving hard to find without a ridiculous price

3) usb2.0 drive + controller card

4) scsi (good luck)

actually scsi is not that horrible of an option, most drives seem to be under 100$, which is retarded for a dvd rom (no write) but by the time you add in all the cost's of the above options (cards cables boxes ect) it might be the cheaper option

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If he takes the long view though, #1 is an excellent choice. Once he has a good ATA controller card, he can add new fast EIDE drives any time he wants, up to four devices total. An ATA card is one of the best upgrades a person can make on those old PCI Macs which lack IDE support and is also a pretty good option on the Beige G3. Even though the Beige G3 has built-in IDE it only provides 16 MB/s transfers (theoretical maximum).

My Umax S900 Frankenmac has an Acard 6280M, a 400 GB Seagate drive, a 40 GB IBM drive, a DVD-ROM drive and a Pioneer DVD-RW drive.