Upgrading cdrom for PS2 ??

[Soulkeeper]

is there anyway to, or has anyone here ever put a faster cdrom drive in their PS2 ???

I hate load times and would love to put an expensive high quality PC cdrom drive in my PS2
do you all think it can be done ??

 

[moogle077]

I thought it was a 40x CD-ROM already ... 52X wouldnt make it much faster ...

 

[brianp34]

wouldn't it need to be a dvd drive? do they make those any faster than 16X?

 

[FishTankX]

It would probably put too much electrical load on the internal powersupply. A 16X CDROM can gulp down more power than alot of the CPUs that came around 1998.

That being said, I've seen the PS2's CDROM from the inside. It's not even IDE. It's not SCSI either. It's a sony prorietary connector. That means different controllers, and crap. So it's a definate no.

That being said, if you could you could probably speed up the loading time 3X, assuming the CPUs not the bottleneck. Alot of PS2 games use compressed data in the memory pool, and decoding that with a CPU is a bit slow..

 

[Soulkeeper]

yeah the PS2 loadtimes would be more than halved with a fast cdrom drive
i bet it's no faster than 20x stock

 

[mooojojojo]

as Brian said - it's a dvd-rom, isn't it?

 

[MrChad]

IIRC, it's a DVD-ROM with a single laser for both DVDs and CDs. Most DVD-ROM drives have two lasers, one for each media type. The DVD-ROM is rated at 4x.

Check the "Will it use CDs or DVDs?" section

 

[moogle077]

I only said CD-ROM cuz most of my games are on CD, not DVD. But then again I haven't bought any PS2 games for a long time :-\

 

[Link19]

I think the PS2 DVD drive is 4X DVD read and 24X CD read. I highly doubt you could upgrade the DVD/CD drive on your PS2, as it does not use standard IDE connectors. I suppose you could try to convert a regular IDE DVD-ROM drive's connectors to the kind the PS2 uses, but it would be a long shot. Anything is possible, but any atempts to try that would most likely fail your first try, and would take so many tries by so many extremely smart people to make it ever work. I suppose an easier way to go would be to try figuring out a way to hook a faster DVD-ROM drive up externally, such as a USB one.

If you really want to know if there is anyway, try calling SONY and see what they have to say.

 

[Soulkeeper]

good idea, thanks
yeah the onboard bios prob wouldn't even recognize any other cdrom drive anyways
ohh well

it would be nice to use a fast usb drive tho, i'll check into that

 

[boyz]

maybe if we can get our pc to perform the same function as the ps2 we would not have to upgrade the thing or buy one, I think somebody should work on that. It's the software. Let me know if it's possible yet.

 

[FishTankX]

It's absolutley impossible.

As far as I know, no graphics card can yet touch the 48GB/s of bandwidth the PS2's videochip has, much less the 6.4GFLops vector units.

 

[boyz]

Nothing is impossible or we would still be dreaming about space and planes.

 

[Alkali]

Actually, I did read a website about a year ago with details about how to swap out the drive for 40x (16xDVD drive that reads at 40x CD). It went on to say the conversion was a sucess and load times were cut by more than half, but as far as I remember there was a lot of re-wiring needed (although he had all the pin-outs on the website). Unfortunately I cant remember the site, and I clear down my history every month or so....