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 Hotrodding the Pismo Phase 6 -- FastMac 4x SuperDrive Expansion Bay Module15 June 2004 by Charles Moore Contributing Columnist print format | email this story | talk
I used to think that the WallStreet PowerBook was the most hotroddable Mac portable, and potentially it was, what with its two expansion bays, two PC Card slots, and a big, deep hard drive bay. However, the last of the black ‘Books, the Pismo, has turned out to be the king of the PowerBook hot rods by virtue of being newer, having New World ROM, a 100 MHz system bus, FireWire, and enough video support to run OS X acceptably. 
My Pismo, a top-of-the-line 500 MHz unit which I obtained used when it was about a year old, has been incrementally hotrodded through several phases, and we’re not done yet. Why should the metal PowerBook owners have all the fun? Of course, even tweaked as it is the old Pismo is not anywhere near being an even performer with a 1.5 gigahertz machine, and it’s permanently handicapped by its non-upgradable 8MB of video RAM and pedestrian by today’s standards RAGE Mobility 128 video accelerator card, which rule out Quartz Extreme support, but for all that it’s no slouch, and it’s great to be able to keep what is one of the nicest PowerBook models ever made in front line service more than four years after it debuted. 
Phase 1 of my Pismo hot rod project was undertaken before I owned it: the addition of VST Zip and SuperDisk modules. These have become less useful with the passage of time, but are still nice to have around. The SuperDisk module even reads and writes floppies in OS X. 
Phase 2 was almost the first thing I did after I got the Pismo -- removing one of the 128 MB RAM modules and replacing it with a 512 MB unit, bringing the total to 640 MB -- which is still not as much as I’d like to have, but it gets the job done reasonably well. And that was it for more than two years, at which point the Pismo had gradually taken a back-seat to my 700 MHz G3 iBook. However, the Pismo got a new lease on life in January of this year with Phase 3, the installation of a Daystar 550 MHz G4 upgrade, which leapfrogged it back past the iBook in performance, and made it my number one production machine again. I was so pleased with the G4 rejuvenation that I decided to add Phase 4 -- a 5400 RPM Toshiba 40 GB hard drive with a 16 MB cache, which resulted in another welcome performance boost. The old Pismo is now a really pleasurable performer in a OS X 10.3 Panther. 
After the hard drive came Phase 5 -- the addition of a Miglia Alchemy FireWire PC Card adapter, which I reviewed here last week. The Miglia card gives the Pismo a connectivity option that even the latest iBooks and 12” PowerBook’s can’t match. 
So what’s next? Phase 6, the subject of this review -- is a FastMac 4x SuperDrive expansion bay module -- much more useful these days than the old Zip and SuperDisk modules, or the original DVD-ROM drive. 
FastMac, which also supplies 500 MHz and 550 MHz G4 processor upgrades for the Pismo, has just introduced a family of new SuperDrive and Combo expansion bay modules in 1x. 2x, and 4x speeds for this great PowerBook model. 
The units are modestly priced, and aside from adding disk burning capability, can also make ideal replacement units for the sometimes troublesome OEM DVD-ROM drives that came with the Pismo. The 4x SuperDrive module, which is the hands-on subject of this review, is based on the same Matsushita UJ-8255 mechanism used in the Aluminum PowerBooks. The complete speed specs for this drive are: “4x2x16x24x8.” The SuperDrive reads most standard CD and DVD formats and writes CD-Rs, CD-RWs and DVDs. DVDs can store up to 4.7GB per disc, the equivalent of seven CDs, 18 Zip 250 disks, or 3,200 floppies. 
While I have a very decent external FireWire CD-burner, it is certainly a great convenience to have disk-burning capability built-in, especially if one takes their ‘Book on the road, and of course the facility to burn DVDs opens up a whole new dimension of possibilities. Installing the FastMac SuperDrive module is utter simplicity. Just pull the release lever for the right-hand device bay on the front of the Pismo, slide out the DVD-ROM drive (or whatever module happens to be occupying the bay), and slide in the SuperDrive module. Takes less than 10 seconds. 
The FastMac 4x SuperDrive is a slot-loading unit unlike the Pismo’s stock, tray-loading DVD-ROM drive. Consequently, it changes the appearance of the right front corner of the Pismo slightly, and it doesn’t quite have the finished look of the OEM drive or even the VST modules, but it looks perfectly fine to me. I was surprised by how much I like the slot-loading feature, even (or indeed especially) for just popping in a CD. All of my previous laptop (and indeed desktop) optical drives have been tray-loaders (plus an ancient Sony caddy-loader in my LC 520), which have a perceived advantage in terms of less complexity, but are always clumsy to use and easily damaged. Slot-loading is definitely better. The FastMac 4x and 2x SuperDrives require installation of a little software driver called PatchBurn, but that only took a minute or two. I used the PatchBurn II driver (included) developed by Christian Möller in RealBasic 5.2 using the MBS-plug-ins written by Christian Schmitz. PatchBurn II System Requirements: The 1x FastMac SuperDrive’s advantage at the same price as the 2x unit is that it requires no driver support, and is thus a true plug and play solution. In several weeks of use, I have found nothing at all to complain about with the FastMac 4x SuperDrive unit. It “just works.” OS X Disk Utility as well as both Burnz and iVCD disk authoring software perform perfectly with it, and while I didn’t test them, there’sno reason to imagine that Toast, iTunes, iDVD, etc., won’t as well. 
As noted, while the 4x SuperDrive model is FastMac’s top-of-the-line offering at $299, the 1x and 2x SuperDrive modules both sell for $40 less, and if you don’t need DVD-burning capability, there is also a 24x CD-R/ CD-RW combo drive module available for $199. 
FastMac Pismo Optical Drive Module Specs and features: SuperDrive 4x for PowerBook G3 Pismo • Super Drive,: 4x, Pismo SuperDrive 2x for PowerBook G3 Pismo • DVD-RW/CD-RW SuperDrive 1x for Pismo • DVD-RW/CD-RW Combo Drive 24x for PowerBook G3 Pismo • DVD-ROM/CD-RW For more information, visit:
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 Charles Moore is a freelance journalist and commentator by profession, and has written for 40 or so different magazines and newspapers in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia over the past dozen years. He has syndicated columns with Continental News Service of San Diego, California, and with Barquentine Ventures Newsfeatures in Canada. Charles is also an associate editor (freelance) with a couple of monthly magazines, and writes software reviews and features for MacToday magazine.
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