[weblacky]

Well technically yes, but by the time you’ve tracked down converters and stuff you likely would exceed the cost of an external CDROM enclosure and a SCSI cable + adapter on eBay.

You’re biggest issue will be a 68 to 50 pin external SCSI bus adapter. Assuming your CDROM is a 50 pin arrow SCSI, you can find a case for it and all that. Then adapt the external cables correctly.

In fact, being able to adapter the Octane external SCSI connector will likely come in handy in the future.

I guess it comes down to what you have available at what price.

To me, trying to use an internal to external ribbon is a big hassle and likely will affect performance and such.

I bought all my stuff many years ago, but I assumed if I’m going to do it, might as well try to get nice stuff that would last and also work on other SGIs. Nearly all my SGIs that can have internal optical drives do, but you may get several that cannot take them (Indy, Indigo, Octane, Octane2) so building a nice external drive helps you utilize other SGI machines you might obtain in the future.