The hacking of the iMac's internals continues. Just a couple of days ago, we made a quick reference to a Sparq drive (that 1 GB removable drive by Syquest) that was available for the iMac. That caused a little confusion, since the official iMac-compatible USB Sparq drive, in all its translucent red glory, is definitely not yet shipping. No, we were referring to the new unit now available from iDrives, which is not a USB product-- though it's still iMac-compatible. You can read all about it at theiMac.com.

Since this drive doesn't use the hot-swappable plug-and-play USB interface, you have to jump through a few hoops to hook one up to your iMac. It ships with an adapter that plugs into a space on the motherboard and has a cable that runs to the expansion panel on the side of the iMac. Once you've got the adapter installed, the drive just plugs right into the new port in your iMac's port bay. And apparently whatever mystery interface iDrives is using (it's not USB, SCSI, or PCI), it's reportedly about 30% faster than USB is.

By the way, iDrives has more than just a Sparq drive-- they also have a $99 floppy drive and a $349 4.3 GB hard drive available, which connect to the iMac the same way. (You can in fact have all three connected at once.) All three are available right now, and there are really only two catches. The first is that you have to be willing to open up your iMac and plug the special connector onto the motherboard-- iDrives claims its a simple, fifteen-minute no-solder-required operation, but since it's not an Apple-authorized motherboard modification, you can wave bye-bye to your warranty. The second catch may be the real deal-killer, though: from looking at the pictures on the website, the iDrives units appear to be beige. That's right, they'll clash with your iMac and if Jeff Goldblum ever comes over to your house for coffee and sees your external iDrive, he'll laugh at you. Are you willing to take that risk? (iDrives is working on more iMac-friendly styles, which are expected out by the end of the year, along with non-USB iMac-compatible Zip drives, Superdisk drives, and CD-RW's.)