Make Your Own External SCSI CD Rom Drive

Make Your Own External SCSI CD ROM Drive

What You Need:

Apple SCSI CD ROM Drive (tehe)

You can use 3rd party drives but they will not boot a Mac in case you need to boot off the CD.

These can be pulled from any Mac with an internal SCSI CD ROM Drive such as the Quadra 610, 650, IIvx, PowerMac 6100, 7100, 8100, 8500, 9500, 9600 series.

External SCSI case

Hard Drive case (not the SyQuest case)

Get these on eBay for as little as $5. Do a search for 'SyQuest SCSI drive case'. This case has an open front bezel which is perfect for the CD ROM drive to fit through. If you can't find one, you can still use the traditional hard drive scsi case, but the front of the CD rom drive will have to sit over the front of the case. This won't be pretty, but it'll work for testing purposes. I used one like this for 3 years when I was at Goodwill Computerworks.

Open the case. There are usually screws on the bottom. If there is a hard drive inside just remove the power cable and the SCSI cable and remove the drive. You might need to detach the SCSI ID cable as well. Pop in the CD ROM drive and connect the SCSI and power cables. You don't have a place to connect the SCSI ID cable so leave it alone. You will change the SCSI ID of the CD ROM drive with jumpers (but you probably won't need to as they ship at ID 3 which is where you should keep it simply because it's easier to keep up with all your SCSI devices if you set all CD rom dirves to #3.

Slide the front of the CD ROM drive through the front of the case if you are using an open bezel case. If not, you'll have to drape the drive over the top of the case and leave the case lid off. On some cases you can remove the plastic front bezel and slip the CD rom drive through.

A SyQuest case.

The inside of a SCSI case.

Rear of the case