Hackintosh Part 2
7 02 2008Yet another seed of 10.5.2 was released to developers yesterday, this time a one step increment to 9C31. Since I’m not ordering any hardware until 10.5.2 is proven stable and installable on a hackintosh the planning continues, this time looking at storage and optical drives.
Modern Mac’s use Sata hard drives (or SAS for the high end) so it makes sense to try to use as much Sata kit as possible. There are very mixed reports of IDE working in the insanelymac forums. The Gigabyte motherboard I have chosen has one IDE connector supporting two devices, and from the hardware compatibility reports this appears to work. I recently switched from a windows based PC acting as a file server to a Synology DS-106e. The Windows server had all my old hard drives in it, a combination of 3×120Mb, a 200Mb and a 300Mb for backups. The synology has an internal 500Mb and another 500Mb connected by USB for a weekly backup, so I didn’t use any of the old drives. This means I have several redundant IDE drives that could be used in the hackintosh. 300Mb’s would be useful, so it’s really going to be down to available funds when I come to order the kit. A 320Gb Sata Samsung drive is £48.12 at the moment, and though this would be nice it may have to wait for upgrade round 2.
The VideoPC that will be retired has a Plextor PX-755SA DVDrw which uses a Sata interface. This sounds ideal, but there are several reports in the insanelymac forums of these becoming invisible to a hackintosh after being powered on for a while. I will try this drive once installed and see how it performs. Any problems and it will be replaced with a Pioneer unit. I’ve owned two Plextor DVDrw’s, the first being a SCSI unit several years ago. I know they are reputed to be the ‘Rolls-Royce’ of optical drives, but I have never been very impressed. Pioneer seem to be more of a standard, and since I have several Pioneer DVDrw’s in various computers giving excellent service that’s my choice if the Plextor plays up.
The final device is a Sata DVD-Rom drive. Aria have a Liteon unit for £11.10, so there’s not really much point in searching for something better given my basic needs. Again, if it plays up I will look for something better.
That’s the drives taken care of, so in Part 3 I will look at the case, Graphics card and other items.
[...] basshead wrote a fantastic post today on “Hackintosh Part2″Here’s ONLY a quick extractI know they are reputed to be the ‘Rolls-Royce’ of optical drives, but I have never been very impressed. Pioneer seem to be more of a standard, and since I have several Pioneer DVDrw’s in various computers giving excellent service … [...]
[...] Part 3 10 02 2008 In Part 1 I looked at motherboard, CPU, cooler and ram. Part 2 covered optical drives and hard drive, so this time it’s case, graphics card and other [...]