Magneto-Optical Drives Reviewed

MikShapi writes "Tom's Hardware is running an informative article about Fujitsu's new Magneto-Optical drives and the MO technology in general. Is the caddy finally back to put an end to scratched Disks?"

Comments

I remember

[Sir Haxalot]

floptical (basically a floppy disk which uses an optical tracking mechanism to improve the positioning accuracy of an ordinary magnetic head, thereby allowing more tracks and greater density.) drives etc very well, they had poor read and write performance and bad reliability. Although these new drives seem to give better reliability, their speed seems to be just as poor. I'd give it a miss and buy one of these beauties.

Re:I remember

[after]

If I am right, you are talking about the 100MB capacity floppy disks. Not sure if this is what you are talking about, but if it is... yes, some times ago, in the NES 8 Bit age, these things were quite popular. They were slow too. I dont know if these were acual floppy diskcs, but they acualy *did* have 100 MB storage capacity and they *did* work in a floppy drive (I saw this done once by my friend, only once, on his IRIX at work)

Re:I remember

[Anonymous Coward]

These aren't flopticals. Magneto-optical drives actually use a very safe storage technology: To change the information on an MO-disk, a laser has to heat the data-layer to a certain temperature AND a magnetic field has to be applied. Neither one alone is enough to change the data. MO-drives also don't have to erase the track before they write the data anymore. Just like CD/DVD-RWs they can erase and write in one go, so performance isn't bad.

Re:I remember

[jwilcox154]

Actually, Sir Haxalot was talking about The Floptical drive created by 3M & Iomega that could unreliably store 21MB on 1 VHD diskette. It also took 30 Minutes to format, the drive could not read 2.88MB Floppies, and couldn't create a boot floptical disk or boot from a disk in a floptical drive, So it quickly became obsolete.

Re:I remember

[1u3hr]

Although these new drives seem to give better reliability..

The drives tested may be "new", but MO disks have been around for maybe 10 years. They were standard for Mac DTP use here (Hong Kong) at least. Recently cheap CD burners are taking their place for that (and I managed to pick up a freebie as a result). Too bad they never got the momentum of Iomega's Zip drives with PCs. Though MO disks are half or less the price, the drives were several times more expensive. Then Iomega's QC went in the toilet and you couldn't trust Zip drives at all. If Fujitsu had tried to get the price down and kept reliability they might have become standard in PCs to replace the floppy. The small, rugged cartridge and 128 to 640 MB storage was compelling, the drives just too expensive.

Re:I remember

[Anonymous Coward]

This is really apples to horseshoes.

'Floptical' was unreliable, and for good reason; conventional floppy media, hole-punched (with a laser, for LS-120) to allow the head to track more tightly.

MO is completely different technology, though about as old. Basically, a laser heats the surface to unlock it for manipulation by a magnetic write head. It takes heat + magnetism to flip bits, and a lot more (point) heat than you'll get on the dashboard of your car, or anywhere else in the real world. Very stable. Changing the disk magnetically also changes the optical properties, meaning *reads* are 100% optical - fast, reliable, unlikely to degrade the media.

Back to writing... Annoyingly, and for reasons I'm not quite sure I understand, an 'erase' pass is usually used before a write pass. That makes writes take a third as long (normal sequence is erase/verify/write); it seems like this could be solved with either a second erase head, or better flying-erase technology (Google up "LIMDOW media" for one approach)... write speeds are also dependent on the cooling/heating rate of the media.

So anyhow, what you get is a slow, but incredibly reliable storage format. After initial modification, those bits are locked in there - not likely to fade like CD-R dye or otherwise be environmentally effected.

More importantly, you get something intended as a block storage format (though they did make a tradeoff in realization - zones on disk are spiraled for density like a CD, reducing random-access performance a bit). You format it like a Zip, HD, floppy, and copy/delete as you wish, the way digital media was supposed to be used. No complicated burning process... and institutional users of MO (remember, some people *care* about archival - like NASA) developed the universal UDF filesystem that's now finding a place on other media. (Of course, if you plug and play a drive on Windows right now, you end up with plain old FAT. I think MacOS is now smart enough to format to UDF automatically.)

You could probably dd an iso9660 image to one if you wanted, but the point is *you don't have to.* No annoying 'burning,' it's just a disk.

The competition here isn't conventional CD-R, but rather "Mt. Rainier" drives of all forms. MO wins on stability, but loses on speed and densities, and relative expense of media. (MOs are hard-sectored; CD-Rs aren't just dye on flat plastic - they need the initial subchannel spiral carved/pressed in too, hence the 'rainbow' diffraction before you've burned anything to them - but they're still a bit simpler to produce in bulk.) The various DVD and CD RW formats are all variants on phase-change media (begat with "PD-ROM"), and with Mt. Rainier, they should be fast, dense (2GB+ for DVD, no?), and convenient - no more 'burning,' proper random-access block/"packet" allocation on the fly - but you'll still have to worry about the media flaking out from heat, sunlight, scratches (no caddies on most), and/or degradation from the read process itself. (Read beams shouldn't fade the dyes, but your car 'shouldn't' leak fumes around the pistons and introduce contaminants to require oil changes, either.)

Maybe that puts things in perspective. I like the things myself just because they're less brain-damaged than (pre-Mt. Rainier) CD/DVD; you format it, you copy to it, you delete from it, you flip the write-protect slider (like on a floppy) if you want... and compatibility was designed into the spec. (A 640MB drive is at least guaranteed to /read/ 128MB and 230MB disks, and as far as I know, all of them can write to the 230s. You can't 'reformat' a 230MB disk to 640 (or 1.3gb) though, as it is hard-sectored; the capacity is a property of the media.)

Re:I remember

[really?]

I am assuming that "new drives" refers to these units, rather than MOs in general. I have been using MOs for about ten years or so; started with a 128 and currently use a few 640s.
They used to be quite popular in Japan, but these days CDRs and DVD-Rs seem to be the most popular. (And, when DVD+/-R/W burners are 120-140 bucks in Akihabara it's easy to see why.)

Re:I remember

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the Floptical drive. Not compatible with floppies, and with a storage capacity of 21MBs, the Floptical drive was used primarily on Indys. The drive itself could read and write PC and Mac formatted 3.5" HDD floppies, but floptical could not be read in anything but another floptical drive.

They were stupid, and cost a ton. Why anyone would use these when Ethernet, CD (even though they were $8 a piece) or even Zip existed is unimaginable.

ANONYMOUS COWARD IS A WHORE

[Anonymous Coward]

THE biggest one on slashdot at that

Re:ANONYMOUS COWARD IS A WHORE

[after]

Lets create a penis

Is anyone still using Magneto-Optical anyway?

[The One and Only]

I remember Magneto-Optical being somewhat "there" in the age of removable media, but does anyone even use it anymore? Why is this still something we care about?

Re:Is anyone still using Magneto-Optical anyway?

[DAldredge]

Because the media doesn't die if you look at it funny.

Re:Is anyone still using Magneto-Optical anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, First let me state that while I'm happy that Tom's Hardware finally covered MO drives, they really didn't put enough information up there to make it useful. Tom's really should have got together a full round-up of CD-RW, DVD-RW, ZIP, Jaz, Superdisk, and Tape. And then compared them in terms of Speed, Capacity, Reliability and Price as well as usability. As it stands you get a fair amount of MO info, but no real idea of how it compares to everything else.

As a happy owner of a Fujitsu 1.3GB MO drive, (internal SCSI) here are my biased thoughts without the misleading graphs and numbers.

1)Write speed isn't as good as a Hard Drive (what is?) but it feels about as fast as my Sony CD-R (32x/10x/40x) when burning. Perhaps slightly slower, but not terribly so. (Just expect it to take awhile if your filling up a full 1.3GB/2.3GB disk)

2)Read Speed is Good. Like any other removable media you get a slight delay when new media is loaded and the TOC is read. But afterwards reads to the disk are *fast*. Unlike most CD-R's there is little spin-up/slow down or loud noises as a disk is read. Feels much faster and more responsive than my CD-R when reading a disk.

3)Reliability/durability is excellent. With my freakish luck I actually managed to run into some bad media. (2 disks out of a 5 pack) and despite having almost completely filled the disk, I was able to get *all* of the data off the disk without error. Every other media I've ever had the misfortune of going bad (Hard drive/Zip/Floppy/PD/CD(R/RW)) I've managed to loose something, even if it was as little as just a single file. (Complete loss or corrupted)

4)Windows drivers have been realiable and installation was simple. Although I'm still trying to get my current Linux install to recognize it properly. (RH9 doesn't seem to recognize it out of the box, and Linux drivers didn't come with the drive when I bought it.)

5)Cost wasn't too rough either. Granted the drive itself isn't as cheap as your average CD-R, but for a low volume seller, the price is fair. And the disks are a good value too, with per disk prices ranging from $20 per 2.3GB disk down to $6 per 230MB disk. (Compare that with Zip prices!)

So taken as a whole, it fills the Reliable Removable storage niche to a T. It won't replace CD-R, Tape or Hard Drives. But it blows the pants of Zip/Jaz/Floppies. Nor can I see you using it to backup your Hard drive either. (Heck I can't see people doing it with CD-R's either...)

Personally I wish that MO was the defacto Floppy replacement, with system builders having something like a 230MB MO as the default cheap option, and offering the 2.3GB on the top end. But that's just my wishful thinking I guess.

-PS To those fools who bring up Mini-Disc's...any problems MD has with catching on are the sole fault of SONY...and their *stupid* anti-copy protection idiocy. It's too little too late for it to replace CD's, but I've found it indispensible as a replacement for Cassettes and/or other portable audio. I've got a Portable unit, Car deck and a stereo unit and I like them. I still buy CD's but I keep them at home and just bring my MD's when I go somewhere.

-PainAmplifier

Re:Is anyone still using Magneto-Optical anyway?

[damien_kane]

Because the media doesn't die if you look at it funny.

Who the hell uses cats to store data anymore anyways?

Re:Is anyone still using Magneto-Optical anyway?

[Stubtify]

yea jewel cases are way better.

MO Drives.

[anakin357]

Will never catch on. Period.

Ever notice how the MiniDisc format truely never caught on? LaserDisc? ZipDrives? CD-R and DVD+/-R have many more people buying equipment in those standards. These proprietary formats will always have a few adoptors, but they absolutely must improve (by an order of magnitude at the very least, DVD anyone?) on the current standards.

Now, if there were an MO drive/disc that could store 20GB on a double-sided disc, that would definitely draw some attention. And by attention I mean *consumer* attention. These are the folks that make the wheel of adopting turn.

Re:MO Drives.

[Anonymous Coward]

MiniDisc is still VERY common in the Music sector... but so is the Atari ST with his stable MIDI I/O...

Re:MO Drives.

[Detritus]

They are already in use. I've seen them in medical equipment and in workstations used for data analysis. One of their advantages over CD-R and DVD-R is that they can be treated like a normal disk. There is no burning, finalizing, multiple sessions, etc.

Re:MO Drives.

[mistert2]

We use to use the optical disk back-up..blah,blah back ten years ago. What a dog.

The machines we are building now, don't have floppies. We put in DVD burners(lotsa sonys). People make a spare of important files on the server(RAID is a good thing) and on CDRs. Zip disks were cool until CD burners came down in price. Floppies are not dependable. We ghost the base image to a bootable DVD and put the image on the server.

How can they continue to make such a lame drive and sell it. If you scratch the disk, you either should have bought a better disk, or you need to clean it. Have you ever heard of a CD case?

I guess we need more idiot proof computers. Wetware is the biggest problem.

Re:MO Drives.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think MD did catch on, perhaps not in the US but they still seem more popular than mp3 players here (although that is changing).

Re:MO Drives.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

If you looked outside your borders you might find cases where those formats "caught on".

Laserdisc and MiniDisc where huge in Japan.

The entire graphic design industry seemed to love the Zip drives. Zip was great because it needed little attention and one could drag files without thinking. To do that with CD-R and writeable DVDs requires a bad hack to be installed into the OS and the disc to be specially re-formatted.

Re:MO Drives.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not terribly informative. From your comment, we only know that 'here' is not the US.

Re:MO Drives.

[Sir Holo]

The Zip disk never caught on? Inexcpliciably, it did. But why didn't the Jaz disk?

Re:MO Drives.

[Carpet]

MO Drives are also very popular among the Asian graphics industry, even more so than CD-Rs and Zip drives. I did a part-time stint between a few graphic companies, and all of them used MOs to transport their stuff between each other and to the printing press.

I actually own a DynaMO 640 USB. It's an older limited release asia-only model, not the new "Pocket" version Fujitsu has now. I've dropped it and crammed it in all sorts of hostile environments. The media, sitting alongside my CD-Rs, don't get dusty, don't scratch. Overall, very reliable drive, even more reliable media. Windows 2000 and above recognize it without any hassle, VERY useful for computers that don't have burners. Large file transfers are a problem, but that's the case with any USB 1.1 device. Maybe it's time to get one of the new USB 2.0 drives...

I think the entire MO technology (MD included, which is essentially the same thing) is really under-advertised in the states. MDs could really kill tapes. All we need is enough MO/MD machines sold and prices should fall.... if only....

Re:MO Drives.

[Grimey6117]

the jaz drive never caught on because it was something like $100 per disk, not to mention i imagine it would be incredibly slow, as it wasn't so much a floppy as almost tape-drive-ish

Re:MO Drives.

[FRiC]

MO's are still very much in use in the Asian graphics industry right now...

But I guess the MO technology is so old and relatively unknown to the typical user that this seems like news? I've got a (Mitsubishi) 640 MB MO drive since 1997 and a (Fijitsu DynaMO) 230 MB drive since 1993.

Oh, and even before then I had a 500 MB 5.25" MO drive in 1991. I still have all the disks fill with uh.. data, but can't find a working drive to read them.

Re:MO Drives.

[kidlinux]

> MiniDisc where huge in Japan.

Were huge? MiniDisc still is huge, and growing, as far as I can tell. I've got one myself and wouldn't replace it with anything. A few of my friends have MD players, and I see them all over campus and in class. And I'm in Canada, eh.

The Sony store wouldn't be selling them if they weren't selling well. Neither would other stores for that matter.

MiniDisc has huge potential. Imagine increasing the track density to that of DVD and using blue lasers. You could pack a huge amount of data onto a small disc. Gigabytes of data on a tiny $5 disc (though admittedly they'd probably charge more just because.)

What's great about the discs is that they're encased, so you don't have to worry about "top-surface scratches" (which, btw, are far worse than playing surface scratches, since the top surface is the media that contains the data.)

What didn't catch on was MD Data. Which is a shame. MiniDiscs would be a perfect replacement for floppies. Small, inexpensive, and high capacity. Even more so if track density was increased. Think about how much space you could save in a laptop.

Re:MO Drives.

[btlzu2]

At the time, however, $100 was a good price for 2GB of storage. My problem with the Jaz drive was that it sucked. The disks were very fragile, the drivers conflicted with Windows Explorer and IOMEGA can't write software worth a damn.

I much prefer the Fujitsu MO drive. We use the 2.3gb model and it blows away anything Iomega could do. After about 10 years of dealing with piss-poor products from Iomega (CD-ROM burners, Jaz, Zip, and Bernoulli Disks) I'm never buying an Iomega product again.

Re:MO Drives.

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as scratching the discs goes, there's no real way around that short of extreme care. They're made out of polycarbonate, which anyone who works in the optical (we're talking eyeglasses here) field can tell you is EXTREMELY prone to scratching. It's biggest advantage is in how impact resistant it is. I'll tell you one thing; I'd gladly trade the ability to flex a cd almost in half for one that doesn't scratch out of spite when you look at it funny. And the brand of disc doesn't matter; they're all made of polycarbonate.

Re:MO Drives.

[amRadioHed]

They're made out of polycarbonate, which anyone who works in the optical (we're talking eyeglasses here) field can tell you is EXTREMELY prone to scratching. It's biggest advantage is in how impact resistant it is. I'll tell you one thing; I'd gladly trade the ability to flex a cd almost in half for one that doesn't scratch out of spite when you look at it funny. And the brand of disc doesn't matter; they're all made of polycarbonate.

Why is this? I imagine anyone who made a cd that didn't scratch so easily would make a killing. I'm guessing the reason is that elasticity is necessary to keep the discs from shattering in your drive. Anyone know for sure?

Re:MO Drives.

[amRadioHed]

What are you going on about? Are you some sort of freak who's never scratched a cd in your whole life? Just to inform you, for us fallible humans discs do get scratched over time. It's inevitable. Usually the damage is minor and goes unnoticed, but we're not always so lucky.

Re:MO Drives.

[Feztaa]

Were huge? MiniDisc still is huge, and growing, as far as I can tell. I've got one myself and wouldn't replace it with anything. A few of my friends have MD players, and I see them all over campus and in class. And I'm in Canada, eh.

So far, I've bought two minidisc players in my life, and though I love them dearly, Sony really needs to get their act together if they want these things to catch on big-time.

My first minidisc player was great, for all intents and purposes it was just a souped-up walkman. Record with line-in, play to line-out, worked great.

The second was NetMD-enabled, it promised to hold 5 times as much music, and sported a USB cable for fast(er) data transfer. It had no support for linux whatsoever! The thing was basically useless to me! Gah.

I settled for recording via analogue, but that's actually a big hassle, especially when you know there's a perfectly good USB cable to connect the thing.

I probably won't be buying another MiniDisc player ever again. In fact, my next portable music player is probably going to be the Neuros. I like to think of it as the iPod for PCs... it's got a 20 GB HD, supports Ogg Vorbis, upgradeable firmware, native linux support... what more could a guy want? Well, Canadian retailers, I guess... :(

Re:MO Drives.

[Anonymous Coward]

Jaz drives were fairly popular among the graphic design crowd, who primarily used them through SCSI, where they weren't horribly slow.

I know a couple Mac users that still routinely use Jaz for sneakernetting.

Re:MO drives.

[Anonymous Coward]

They do.

Media's still expensive, but you're paying for reliability. Sure, use CD-R for your MP3 collection, but all that priceless porn?

Re:MO drives.

[DAldredge]

Do you wish to sell it?

Re:MO Drives.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you looked outside your borders you might find cases where those formats "caught on".

But... but... that would require research, thinking, and consideration of other cultures, none of which are the American Way (tm)

Re:MO Drives.

[frycarson]

Don't worry, they don't support the windows software either.

Yes, the shitty windows software is the biggest downside to the new MD Players. The plus is they have battery life in spades. I got one of those NetMD's, and aside from the software, it is the best music device i've ever seen. I go about 2 monthes between changeing the 1 AA battery. If sony would make better software/release what they do to make it work it would eliminate most other players. Also they have digital in, but not out, for high end cd player ripping. The downside is you need Sony's optical cable to plug in to it.

FryCarson, I want an MD Data drive.

Re:MO Drives.

[gilgongo]

> Ever notice how the MiniDisc format truely never caught on?

Pardon? Here in the UK I can buy a pack of MiniDiscs at my local supermarket, in fact they're next to the tinned foods counter at Sainsbury's accross the road.

If that's not an indication of the level of penetration the format has, I don't know what is!

Oh, and we're using MO at work because we need to keep data for more than ten years. Something that's probably not going to be possible with other formats.

Re:MO Drives.

[tgrigsby]

Zip Drives didn't catch on? Every single machine I have has one. And every customer I have has one. When other means can't get the bits reliably to the the desired destination, a ZIP drive is an easy way to get it there. There's no "burn" process involved, making it much easier to explain to clerks who are not, almost as a rule, any more computer savvy than they can get away with. The media is reusable and I don't have to worry about scratches. They take a considerable licking with no problems. Sure, magnets would present a problem, but they haven't so far in all the years I've been using Zip drives.

LaserDisc never made it big, true, and MiniDisc ended up in niche markets, but Zip drives rock.

The new floppy?

[Takara]

The DynaMO 640 Pocket, which only has a USB 1.1 interface...

I can see the slogans now... "Magneto-Optical! Floppy drive size, floppy drive speed."

(go for the USB 2.0 version)

Re:The new floppy?

[Zarbuck]

I have all ready seen it... does any one remember minidisc?... it started as a data disk before sony started to put music on it and it died... it not to long ago started to come back with mp3 files on the disks this time... and on another note they look alot alike... Minidisc

just to sumarize

[IAR80]

Good impression, but low performance

Re:just to sumarize

[Anonymous Coward]

Low performance in speed,
but high performance in security and reusability.

A person can use this for daily and portable backup more reliable then cd-rw - in my humble oppinion. Only not too many PC will be have an MO drive.

Re:MOD PARENT DOWN PLEASE

[Anonymous Coward]

...and it's also very offtopic. The story is about MOs, not flopticals. An explanation how MOs work and why they are much more reliable than DVDs is in the article, for those who care to read it.

Nice try.

[ahfoo]

Everybody wants to move that obsolete electronics. Can't blame them for trying, but for the price of just the drive you could have two 120Gig HDs in a RAID AND a CDR to make ten copies if it's so damn important to back up those old copies of Firebird and Open Office.
If you wait a few months you'll be able to swap the CDR with a DVDR and get a free color cell phone with a 1.3Megapixel CMOS camera built in. Did I mention the free printer?

Re:Nice try.

[Stubtify]

You're missing the point. You can't take those 120Gig drives with you, and you can't rely on that CD-RW/DVD-RW to be reliable enough for mission critical stuff. Not to mention that you can't make changes to the cd's without either a complete reburn or a hack (and I've had too many DirectCD discs go bad to call them reliable). Ever see a cdrw survive being used for 6 months, shipped to printing companies, back, and then reused? But then again you've got 240Gigs of stationary storage so you could just ship one of those Hard drives right?

Its hard to put a limit on the price of having that kind of peace of mind.

Re:Nice try.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mission critical? Hmm. Apollo 11, we have contact.
What CDR software are you using? Perhaps you should look at the options. It's generally not a problem to add data to a CDR. Each time it adds an increment of about 15megs, but no big deal. I wouldn't exactly call that hacking.
Besides, I send stuff to the printer on CDR all the time. Why do I want it back when the disc costs less than the postage?

Re:Nice try.

[Anonymous Coward]

One possibility is to get one of the 2.5" USB drives. They're sturdier then the big 3.5" USB drives and some of the drives don't even require external power sources. (Not sure how well that works, but it might make it plug-n-go.)

Hardware Conflicts

[DrEldarion]

I hear that Magneto-Optical drives conflict horribly with the new X-Optical drives.

-- Dr. Eldarion --

Re:Hardware Conflicts

[Anonymous Coward]

Die plz.

Parent makes good point.

[Neophytus]

We've had some really dumb mods browsing at +1 recently, rather than -1, and as such the bullshit gets false credited. Mods, please read the FAQ.

Re:Parent makes good point.

[aardvarkjoe]

Maybe you're too young to remember, but we've had really dumb mods forever. (Tho we used to call them editors.) There's nothing new to see here.

How long has 1.44 been standard?

[LargeNemo]

It's about time someone did this. Floppy disks are cool but they store so little. The IBM PS/2s came with slightly larger 2.88meg floppy drives, but for some odd reason, they never caught on. Zip / superdrives were in vogue for a time, but alas the media cost a pretty penny and there was no assurance that the PC you wanted to put the media in had a Zip or Superdrive. Mini-disk would have been nice, the media you could get just about anywhere, but it never was a PC standard. I like caddies, even if it costs me a few times extra then plain media. Doesn't take up much more space, offers protection, generally is a good idea. Video tapes offer this, old style video pre-laser video disks offered this, floppys still offer this (though I admit, I'm still using that pile of AOL floppies they sent me years past). People are stupid and don't take care of their media. Jewel cases break, more compact sleaves based cases still are prone to scratching. That one piece of software is always going to be in that box somewhere and just when you need it, it's damaged on that one file you need.

God I hope so...

[The Governor]

Is the caddy finally back to put an end to scratched Disks?
I always thought that removable media (cd's, dvd's) with no protective covering was the most idiotic invention of our time. I hope MO or something similar makes a comeback, but it always seems like whatever is cheaper wins. Ah, who cares about technical superiority anyway, right?

Re:God I hope so...

[Crolis]

I have to agree completely. When DVDs first came out I had to scratch my head on the reason why they didn't enclose them in caddies as part of the packaging.

Considering how many DVD rentals are scratched or scuffed when you rent them from the local Blockbuster/Hollywood/Mom-n-Pop I can't imagine why they didn't go for this design choice.

You could still have used recordable DVDs that were inserted in a caddy, but the store bought would would come in a sealed caddy. Seems like that's a better way to protect a 20-30 dollar investment in a movie from the natural wear and tear of being used.

-Crolis

Re:God I hope so...

[amRadioHed]

I imagine the reason was simply so the DVD drives could be backwards compatable with CDs.

Re:God I hope so...

[Anonymous Coward]

In my experience, most of the damage to CDs and DVDs occurs when they are OUT of the playback device. People don't take care of them, and leave them lying around outside their cases (or even on the floor!). A caddy for the device wouldn't protect against this kind of damage, and it would significantly raise the cost of the media if each and every disc came with their own caddy.

Re:God I hope so...

[Thing 1]

Seems like that's a better way to protect a 20-30 dollar investment in a movie from the natural wear and tear of being used.

And there's where capitalism and best practices diverge: the current system is a great way to capitalize on repeat purchases, especially by the video rental stores.

I for one (not gonna say it!) can't wait until we start getting "open source"-style hardware designs. Already starting to happen with OpenBIOS and LinuxBIOS; other hardware should follow (especially as we develop nanotechnology and are able to duplicate any physical item).

Once we're in that future, you can have your own caddy system if you so desire.

Im sticking to my DVD-R

[adeyadey]

Even 5gb is not really enough for me to back up my HD (or DV footage) efficiently - but its the best compromise so far. Ive had enough of obsolete data-formats in the past - I have film on "Digital-8" format that is going to be expensive to find a camera to read it.. Stick t the big formats - Mini-DV, CD-R, DVD-R, you will always be able to find a reader for these. Handy if you need to access your data on someone elses system too, without lugging a drive around. Mind you, I would like to see a 10gb version of DVD-R..

By the way I was trying to back up loads of 1 hour DV films onto DVD - any thoughts on the most efficient process, the best MPEG2 encoder, etc?

Re:Im sticking to my DVD-R

[iamhassi]

"I have film on "Digital-8" format that is going to be expensive to find a camera to read it."

Unless you consider that Sony still makes "Digital-8" camcorders, so I wouldn't exactly consider Digital8 "obsolete" yet, at least until they stop making the camcorders...

Re:Im sticking to my DVD-R

[adeyadey]

Oh sure, I know, but the point is that the head wore out on my original cam (just after the warranty went, sony make some cr*p these days) sony want to charge close to 200 pounds ($300) to replace the head (what a rip off), and I dont fancy shelling out for another recorder just to access some tapes. Dig-8 is rare enough that I havent seen another recorder or anything. Lesson - stick to main formats (MiniDV) and dont buy Sony again..

MOD GRANDPARENT UP, MOD PARENT DOWN

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, yes

[Dark Lord Seth]

Does anyone remember zip disks? Marvellous little things; decent storage capacity, decent access times, not too big size wise... Yet they failed. Badly. Why? First of all, the price: There is no justification for buying a 150 USD zip drive with 10 USD disks when you can get a 50 USD CD burner with 25 CDs for 10 USD. Also, there was this whole deal about Iomega being really anal with the zip drive specs ( Which in turn caused high prices which I mentioned before because there simply is NO competition. ) and the basic lack of Windows support for zip disks.

Let's hope this doesn't happen to these MO drives, that'd be a shame... That said, when the hell will we be rid of diskettes?

Re:Ah, yes

[Dot.Com.CEO]

I know that up to a couple of years ago, all graphics designers used Zip drives and media almost exclusively. CD-recorders might be cheaper now but they were not this cheap 5 years ago, and you could just put a zip disk in a padded envelope with some certainty it would survive the post. Iomega made A LOT of money with zips, I'm sure.

Re:Ah, yes

[shione]

They also had a huge problem with reliability issues known as COD (click of death) where the drive would make click click click noises and render the disks permanantly unreadable. I think that turned a lot of people away from Zip disks.

Re:Ah, yes

[doj8]

I can't imagine why you think Zip drives failed.

It's like saying horses failed, because we now have cars.

They had their time. They were ubiquitous throughout the graphics industry and are still widely used. I do agree that the newer Zip drive formats are less popular and less needed today. They do still fill a niche. Kind of like horses still fill niche today.

At the time 100 MB Zip drives were sold, CD burners were several hundred dollars (definitely much more than the Zip drives) and CD burners had reliability & performance issues.

I'm puzzled over the claim of lack of Windows support. From the very beginning even the parallel port Zip drives worked with Windows. Albeit, the parallel port ones were poor performers. But they were comparable in speed to many of the CD burners at that time. The IDE Zip drives (and now USB) have no such problems.

Zip disks were not without problems, of course. But they did solve a problem then and still solve some problems now.

In no way is that a failure. Just because the time for a technology has passed, does it make it a failure. By that definition of failure, everything is a failure because its time has (or will) pass.

Re:Ah, yes

[BrianH]

Zip drives failed? Man, if you came to my office and said that the graphics guys would lynch you! Not only are Zip drives still standard equipment on thousands of our office PC's, but we even have Zip libraries organized by our own proprietary barcode system. When someone in our office tells you on the phone "I'm sending that file over to you", they're more likely to SneakerNet a Zip disk to your office than transfer it by LAN or Email. Sad too...our gigabit ethernet is woefully underutilized :)

Re:Ah, yes

[rufey]

When I purchased my first CD-R drive way back in 1996-ish, Zip drives were less expensive than the CD-R drive. The Zip media was more expensive than the CD-R media though (15 USD versus about 2-3 USD).

Sure, CD-R/RW drives are cheap now and Zip drives cost about the same as they did way back when. My PentiumII/350 cost a lot more 5 years ago (when I built my PC) than it costs now. In fact, it would be hard to even find a PII/350 being offered for sale these days. So did the PII chip fail? No. It was the hottest CPU to have in its day. Its just that as new technology emerges and improves in both performance and cost, old technology, unless its updated, is left behind.

I'm guessing that in 5 to 10 years, people will be saying the same thing about CD-Rs vs DVDs. Why would anyone have purchased a CD-R/RW that holds only ~700 Mbyte and is slow (remember, think 5 - 10 years in the future) compared to DVDs, which can hold a lot more and is blazing fast? It isn't because CD-R/RW was a failed technology, its just that new technology came out (DVD+/-R/RW) and improved faster than CD-R/RW technology did (remember, I'm being hypethetical 5 to 10 years down the road here).

But I definatly agree that the no-competition with the Zip specs certainly had a hand in making Zip drives less and less attractive to the now cheaper alternatives.

Re:Ah, yes

[Anonymous Coward]

You're badly mistaken, zip drives were nearly ubiquitous in the late '90's. Hell, every system at my university, even, the newest ones, has a zip drive. They're not even dead yet, as a format, although they probably will be in about ~4 years.

Re:Ah, yes

[volkris]

Seriously, you should come check out the zip drive use at my university.

Here every new computer purchased for the computer labs comes with a zip drive, and students use them all the time.

I hate the little things myself; zip disks beat out many better products with higher capacity, cheaper media, and generally better performance.

But to say they failed is just completely opposite to what I and many others here have experienced. In particular the fact that they're still being made after so many years should indicate that they did not fail. Look at the various competing products and notice how many of those are no longer around, and consider what that says about the zip drives.

Re:Ah, yes

[Mairsil]

Excuse me? You couldn't even leave the disks on a table for an hour and assume they'd still work. Whereas a CD in a full-size jewel box will survive almost anything.

Zip drives where utterly unreliable pieces of crud. The only reason they sold well is because they were cheap, and were the only practical way to move large loads of data (CR-RW wasn't there yet, and CD-R was expensive). The disks and drives used to die all over the place (remember the click of death?). I'm glad CD-RW got cheap pretty fast.

Re:Ah, yes

[Ziviyr]

Does anyone remember zip disks? Marvellous little things; decent storage capacity, decent access times, not too big size wise... Yet they failed. Badly. Why?

First of all, it would be safer to carve your data out of jello and throw it onto a freeway.

Secondly, said carving and chucking would be debatably faster.

Thirdly, you don't have to worry about the blue jello being incompatible with red cars.

Fourthly, somewhere along the line Zips got a really bad rap. One that no lifetime of replacement disks would fix. For me at least.

Re:Ah, yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only were the CD writers of the period much more expensive, but the media was hugely expensive, and non-reusable. CD-RWs cost a ton more, and were pretty unreliable (prone to failure after several uses)--and not every drive out there could read them. They were also much slower, and one had to leave the computer alone in fear of creating a golden coaster. Even 4x = 15 minutes, and we did'nt have 'burn proof' technology.

It's no wonder why Zips were (and still are, though pehaps less so) heavily used in the art and printing industry.

Re:Ah, yes

[iamhassi]

Does anyone remember zip disks?

Yes, but from what you've said it's clear you don't. Zip drives were out long before CD-R drives were even avaliable. In the mid-90s there were basically two options for portable media: floppy and Zip. I bought my first EPSON Zip drive (yes, Epson made Zip drives) for $99 after mail-in rebate in 1996. A 1x CD-R drive would have easily cost $1000 at that time, and blank CD-Rs were $5+ each. CD-RW was just a dream in a memo on someone's desk.

the basic lack of Windows support for zip disks

What exactly do you mean by "lack of Windows support? It was supported about as well as any other peripheral, which means the manufacture supplied drivers & support.

Re:Ah, yes

[demonbug]

Does anyone remember zip disks? Marvellous little things; decent storage capacity, decent access times, not too big size wise... Yet they failed. Badly.

Zip disks definitely did not fail. For a number of years they were extremely popular, because they filled a niche that nothing else really did - they were relatively cheap, offered decent performance (certainly faster than the CD burners out at the time), and pretty easy to use. you could get a 100MB zip drive and 10 disks for like $150 at a time when a CD burner was a couple hundred and media $3-$5 a pop (and it could only be used once). Just because zip drives are no longer popular does not mean they were a failure, it just means that other technology eventually caught up and passed them. At a time when you had to be very careful to get a CD to burn properly (no buffer underrun protection, etc.) you could plug a zip drive into the printer port and just drag and drop files into it. It wasn't until the last to years or so that CD burners really got to the same level of ease of use.

Re:Ah, yes

[Wolfrider]

--Excuse me, I've been using Zip 100 drives ever since they were PARALLEL PORT based, and never had a problem. In fact I invested in 1 IDE drive and 1 USB drive, and use them for critical backups on both of my Linux systems.

SuperDisk

[Detritus]

I still have an Imation SuperDisk 120MB drive. It uses magnetic media with an optical servo track. The disk are about the same size as a 3.5" floppy. I've never had any reliability problems with the drive or the media. Imation stopped making the drives but you can still buy the media. The SuperDisk was a major improvement over the 3.5" floppy, like that is saying much. Compaq pushed them for a while but they never became standard.

Re:SuperDisk

[Dystopian Rebel]

The first generation of the LS-120s was slow. But the second generation (the 2x) is/was excellent and I own three of them. I like unpopular but reliable technology.

Solid State is the future

[Fjord Prefect]

MO might make a reappearance. Some people might adopt it for a bit, but in the end, it will be the sort of things like the USB thumb drives and that technology that will win out. Those things are so tiny, and they're getting bigger and bigger capacity. I can get a 2 GB CF card for my Dell Axim, and the capacities just keep going up and up. Pretty soon you're going to have CF cards (and the like) that rival DVD +/- R/RW for capacity. I think that's the way things are going, not Magneto-Optical.

Why CD's/DVD's are better

[wud]

the only reason that cds/dvds caught on like they did is because you don't have to rewind... noone *REALLY* cares about sound quality... its all about convience, thats why people choose mp3s over cds, even though cds sound much better(generally) So since people are already used to these formats it makes sense to use it for data as well... removable media wont have a huge turning point untill theres multipule GB fixed media drives that are small and inexpensive.... untill then ill stick to my hotswap hard drive trays and my 30 60 and 80 gig hard drvies.

Re:Why CD's/DVD's are better

[wud]

i meant solid state... not fixed media.. im gonna get more coffe

Re:Why CD's/DVD's are better

[Loconut1389]

I think a lot of people -do- care about Dolby Digital and home theater systems. Plus progressive scan on an HDTV or other high scan line projector looks very amazing. DVD -is- a better format, and rewinding was hardly more than a nuisance on VHS, IMHO - plus rewinders were cheap.

The funny thing is?

[Transcendent]

This just looks like a MiniDisk to me that i've been using for years for portable audio... I was wondering when they'd get around to actually putting data on them... They're so tiny and have such a nice case.

Perhaps MDs will make a comback if this technology gets more mainstream?

Re:The funny thing is?

[Anonymous Coward]

The real question is, when would they get around to putting music on MOs? Data MO precedes music MO (MiniDisc) by a number of years. When Steve Jobs added an MO drive to the 1988 NeXT cube, the technology was already mature.

And believe it or not, the 2003 MO drives are not much faster, not much bigger, and not much cheaper than the 1988 drives. Everyone thought MO would catch on in the 90s, but it didn't, and it stagnated quite terribly :(

Re:The funny thing is?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, there used to be a MD Data format alongside the MD you use today. Sadly the Data MD's were physically incompatible with the Music MD's...usual Sony stupidity.

Anyway, the MO in the article is NOT an MD. Physically it's bigger (the size of a Zip disk) and it holds much more data. A MiniDisc has something like 150MB of space on it (The ATRAC formatting of the data is how they get 74Min/80Min of music on each one.) while your MO's now have a size of 2.3GB for the 3 1/2 disks and ~5GB for the 5 1/4 sized disks. There are some larger capacity optical drives out there but AFAIK these don't adhere to the MO standards, and are vendor only products.

Re:The funny thing is?

[The Original Atrox]

Sony initially, way back when, -did- have a MD-data devision. -but- you couldent use regular music MD blanks. Since the music standard came later on. This is a shame to me... because I believe your right. MD not only has a good format (MO) but also has a great case design. I have had MDs I have stepped on, dropped, set computer towers on inadvertantly... that still worked. If only floppies were so reziliant... All of that -and- if one wants, one can put a snap-over cover over the MD for further protection. Add in the fact that they arent nearly as suseptable to magnetic interferance, and you have yourself a rather well built datavault... So yea, SONY... bring em back as a floppy replacement... I know I'd buy one!

Atrox

Re:The funny thing is?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you guys don't pay much attention.

MD *is* a MO format (albeit much smaller; a 3.5" ISO standard MO disk is about the size of a floppy and the thickness of two stacked.. MD is the size of .. a Minidisc.). However, Minidisc is goofy. Sony tried to farm it as a data format once (shearing off the edge of the disc casing, so 'audio' MDs with the full case wouldn't fit in a data drive), then killed that. Now they're trying again - see the NetMD FAQ - but *only* as an audio format. (I've seen a few Vaios in the stores with "NetMD" drives/players built in.)

The beauty of 'real' MO is that you can format the disc any way you can format a hard drive. Want FAT? You can do that. Want partitions? Write a partition block, whether x86-style, BSD slice style, Mac style, or Amiga style. Want to boot from it? That's slightly more complex - find out if your IDE or SCSI BIOS supports booting from devices in the removable class; if not, flip the DIP switch or jumper on the drive that tells it to emulate a hard drive. (If you have to do that, you can't expect an OS with no concept of 'mounting' - Windows - to support safe ejection after booting.)

Want to store music on one? Format it however you like; there's no reason you couldn't 'dd' a dump of a CD to one, and then 'dd' it back to burn it to the 'right' media, though you'd need to fiddle around to trick software into playing it off the MO. It's not much different than a CF card, though presumably cheaper for the capacity and possibly even more robust.

At least one company is making a car MP3 player that reads the files off a standard (Windows FAT-format) MO disk. Sadly, I can't remember the name of the product; I was surprised to stumble across it in the back of my cousin's "Bling Wheelz!"-type magazine.

Re:The funny thing is?

[Technician]

Sony does make both a Data and a Music MD. They are not interchangable because Sony in their wisdom added Serial Copy Protection to the Music MD. This simply means the player will not permit the file (Music) to be retrieved back off the device bit for bit. This is a bad thing for data. They made a Data MD drive. The made it so you couldn't read the Music MD disks in it. This combination of incompatable formats prevented copying of MUSIC MD's or making Music MD's on a Data MD drive to use in a music MD. This pretty much killed any intrest in the USA for the Data MD. Some musicians could deal with the Serial Copy Restrictions in the Music MD player, but for most of us, the CDR made an end run past Sony on this one. You could RIP MIX BURN on a CDR drive and play the result in a CD Player. Sony MD's are made to NOT do this.

Info on the SONY Data MD can be found here

http://www.minidisc.org/650mb_md.html

The real floppy killer.....

[zenoza]

The real floppy replacement device is going to be the usb memory stick. Every computer now has a usb port. These things can hold up to 256 mb. There might be larger now.. but these are small... and you can even put them on your keychain.

this media ( optical, dvd, cd, tape) is going to exist for backup purposes.. but if you need data to exist for 10+ years.. i hope the drives to read the data will still work, or exist in 10+ years... So far dvd, and cd will be a good choice for 10+ year reading...

the usb memory sticks are probably not for long term data storage. but for moving data between computers they are piiiiiimp!!

And for you ftp or any other protocol guys who use that to transfer files... there are times when you will not have an internet connection nor a local network to transfer files....

Re:The real floppy killer.....

[locke baron]

I agree. However, this isn't likely to happen until we convince everybody to stop using NT4. (No, this isn't a Linux troll. Win2k or WinXP would do just as well. Or Linux - just so you know this isn't a pro-Windows troll... gah) /posting this from work, where we're stuck with NT4.

Re:The real floppy killer.....

[EvilSporkMan]

Say, what's the effect of magnets on USB memory sticks? We're talking headphones here, not leaving the damn thing on top of a radar magnet. Will it ruin the stick? Just erase data? Do nothing?

Re:The real floppy killer.....

[zenoza]

To be honest i do not know.... i would hope they have tested these devices in real world.. i mean they make these things to go on key chains!!!! that is some brutal environments....

but my guess is that a headphone magnets are NOT going to harm these things.. in fact.. i will test it right now with my own device... if it fails.. good.. then i will have lost nothing... buahah..

for fun i put it up to my sub, and all speakers in my apt... . now to read the stick.. and wow.. i still have the data on it.. how cool.. an unoffical test. but it passed.. :)

Re:The real floppy killer.....

[zenoza]

yep, there are limitations..... but the memory sticks could possibly be best suited for students. This can replace the floppy for them as for the few who own or work on computers that cannot support these as easily.. other solutions exist to cover them :( or :)

Re:The real floppy killer.....

[Anonymous Coward]

hi,

I see your volunteering for doing USB stick tests with your hardware. May slashdotters now suggest various and creative tests in this thread?

Thanks!

Re:The real floppy killer.....

[locke baron]

Not surprising - USB sticks use flash, which isn't magnetic. I'd say it would take one helluva field to seriously frell up the data on those chips. Now, static OTOH, that could be more destructive. (ie, don't try it)

Re:The real floppy killer.....

[the_haxorest]

The problem with these though, is that they're so fesking expensive. I just checked out Price Watch, and found a 256MB Memory Stick for 61 USD. Not too shabby, however, for 2 USD less than that, I could get 200 CD-RW's. Each one capable of storing over twice as much data as a single memory stick, not to mention, just as reusable. Sure, maybe it's not as convienient to carry around, but you're getting exactly 129.744 GB more reusable storage space, for less money.

Re:The real floppy killer.....

[Anonymous Coward]

USB key drives aren't about holding alot. They're about being conveniant. Serriously: What do you have that you regularly use that you would want to have on a keychain that takes up 256MB?

32MB is quite great as a substitue for what you would use floppies for. Small documents that you need to take somewhere, encryption keys, pictures, a few music files or whatever. It's about conveniance, not storage, and it's not for everyone. So what.

2.3GB MO not exactly new

[HalfFlat]

Fujitsu have had this tech out for over two years. But sadly, outside of Japan, hardly anyone has heard about it.

MO, for me, is a story of 'if only'. MO storage has always beat the pants off of removable tape, Zip and Jazz, and CD-RW. It's only recently, with DVD-RAM, that MO had a true competitor.

MO has always been robust and (compared to other removable storage) quick. High end tapes have since eclipsed MO in write performance, but are still more fragile and certainly not random access.

MO has the advantage of standards too. There are a whole series of MO disc capacities, both in the 5.25" andd 3.5" formats, ranging from 230MB and smaller up to 5GB (in the large format.) But pretty much every drive can read discs from way back in the sub 300MB days, and write to discs from the previous 2 or 3 generations.

Watching such inferior technology as Zip and even floppies drive MO out of the market has been a form of geek torture. So why did it happen?

I think as always, it has been a combination of cost and marketing. Judging from the previous comments here, even among the /. crowd, MO is practically unknown. Fujitsu and other MO vendors seemed completely uninterested in marketing to the SOHO crowd. The media price has also been excessive. While good value (compared to Zip) in the dollars to MB ratio, it never was cheap enough to become a carefree purchase, like floppies or CD-Rs today are.

If we could do it all over again, I think MO should have been marketed like zip, and with the media manufacturers even selling below cost in order to get market penetration (and then reaping profits when they can take advantage of economies of scale.) Note that the first NeXT cube had an MO drive. At 600 MB per disc (300 per side), in 1988. With speeds comparable to a slow hard drive of the time for reading (and about twice as slow at writing.)

Sad, so sad.

Re:2.3GB MO not exactly new

[joto]

High end tapes have since eclipsed MO in write performance, but are still more fragile and certainly not random access.

Uhh, high-end tapes have always had faster write-speeds than hard-disks. If all you want to do is write data fast, use tapes, or maybe a SAN or something like that. But then again, it's possible we have different opinions about what constitutes "high-end".

Re:2.3GB MO not exactly new

[Brandybuck]

We use MO drives at work (it's a DICOM standard while CDROM is not). Not blazingly fast, but good enough that you can boot an OS off of it and not care much. Handy as a floppy, roomier than a zip, handy for backups (before the days of the huge harddrives), etc.

What went wrong? Hard to say. But one can compare with zip drives to see what the difference was. You had parallel port zip drives, handy in the days of sneaker net, but I've never seen a parallel port MO drive. You could get IDE zip drives, but MOs tended to stick to SCSI. Until recently, the few IDE MO drives out there were crap. There were some OEMs including zip drives in their systems, but I'm not aware of any that include removable MO drives.

But I think they're dead altogether now that flash memory devices are common. Which is a shame because there are places where MO still makes sense. But specialized applications and hardware still dances to the tune of the desktop user. Sad.

Re:2.3GB MO not exactly new

[HalfFlat]

It's true that I had very little to do with enterprise stuff at the time that I was talking about, but back in 1992, I thought DLT was pretty much the high end, and it (I believe) was considerably slower than hard disks (and comparable with MO.)

This was before AIT an I think even before Exabyte's Mammoth tape drive was released.

Was there fast tape tech then?

Re:2.3GB MO not exactly new

[joto]

DLT is a good tape that doesn't loose your data. It can also be about twice as fast as your average harddrive. IBM has some nice stacked tapedrives which let's you insert a rack of 10 or so tapes. With two tapedrives, you can alternate between them while the other is rewinding and loading the next tape. If you need higher speed, add enough RAM for buffering, and use more tapedrives.

Of course, at this point, you may seriously want to consider using a SAN solution anyway :-)

Not new news, people....

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this "news"? MO drives have been in relatively wide use in Japan for over 10 years. (I personally remember seeing the first generation 128MB, I believe, back in 1993) They are readily available in capacities up to 2.3GB at every computer shop in the country.

BTW, here is an article from 1998 describing how Fujitsu "has announced a new lineup of...MO drives" for the North American market.

http://www.exn.ca/Stories/1998/05/06/64.asp

A company re-announcing 5 year old technology is not news.

i do..

[gimpboy]

i picked up an old mo drive a while back with 10 128 mb disks and 5 256 mb disks. i use it to backup stuff like finance info and the like. one really cool thing about mo drives was their backwards compatability. so if i bought a 2gb mo drive, i can still read my 128mb disks. at least thats how it used to be.

another really neat aspect is things like magnets dont have an effect on them. think of a cdrw that you can write to like a zip drive. sure they have those hacks that let you write to a cdrw like it's a regular drive, but they are not consistant across platforms. try running mkfs.ext2 on your cdrw.

they were really useful, it's a shame they never caught on.

CAN I INTEREST YOU IN SOME FAGGOT HIPPIE SMEGMA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Backing up DV to DVD

[Kozz]

This website has likely everything you need: http://www.dvdrhelp.com/capture.

Re:Backing up DV to DVD

[adeyadey]

I was hoping to find some hands on gen about various MPG2 encoders, particularly open-source/freeware ones, how good are they?

Re:Backing up DV to DVD

[Kozz]

That's getting out of my realm of experience. This might help you: http://developers.videolan.org/. Or it might not. That's all the more I can offer, hope it gives you some good leads.

Re:Backing up DV to DVD

[Anonymous Coward]

Try Doom9.org

Yup.

[theTerribleRobbo]

Here's a nice link for those who have no clue what you're talking about:

What IS the "Click of Death"?

Back in the days...

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember back in over a decade ago we were among the first to review these 540 (or something) MB MO's for a rather large potential user (read national museum - they wanted to put everything on reliable digital media). Those were the large 5 1/4" disks. Later the 3 1/2" 128MB turned up, but that's also close to a decade ago.

One of the problems back then was that the size wasn't too great (540MB IIRC, and they were double-sided, in the sense you actually had to physically eject and turn the disk!), and the media costed a load of money. That the drive cost ~$4.5k back then is another matter (OK, perhaps we were the first). The drives did run on SCSI though, which was a big plus. This was back in 1991.

Fast forward to 2003, a slashdot story, and a link to THG. Look at that first photo. What does it read? "640MB". Is this really over a decade later, or have I magically woken up in the middle of the '90s with a kick-ass computer I could probably peddle for, oh, $10M? Don't think so.

As has been noted by other posters, when the media itself of "removable media" storage is >10 times more costly than using e.g. harddisks (~$1/GB nowadays - and sinking (spare the jokes about the quality going the same way, we all know about that by now)), data security can come in many forms. Like, I could probably buy ten harddisks and store that data on, "archive" nine of them and only use one of them to actually access the data. Those ten drives would be from different manufacturers, have different sizes, and all be stored on different locations. Now how's that for data security (not to mention redundancy) compared to one single overpriced MO disk?

Yes, I agree, MO was cool back then, and MO is still cool. But how many dollars of cool do you want to pay/GB? To me, it wasn't so cool after all...

In addition, touching upon storage and safety. Back then I could back up all of a system several times on a single tape. Nowadays I can't even back up a single harddisk on one tape!

Re:corepirate nazi softwar gangster execrable revi

[Anonymous Coward]

This, my friends, is how you troll.

Takin it back old school.

Plasmon optical platters

[SeXy_Red]

My work has 6 optical platter "Jukebox's" that they run for a client, we have had them for atleast 4 or 5 years now. there double sided 2.6B (per side)platters in steal (the newer ones are plastic)caddy, they look fairly similar to these, but the caddy isn't transparent. There very sturdy, I have dropped many a platter and I have yet to break one...hehe...yet. I wouldnt mind them so much if it werent for the fact that the jukebox's have an ass load of problems, some days we have to restart a single box 10 times during the coarse of the shift, now keep it mind it takes 15 minutes+ to restart. Plasmon has information of MO drives and media on there website, the MO jukebox's look alot like the older ones I am talking about, just less boxy. My point is that this is really not a new technology, some large businesses have been using similar products for years, with in my case, crappy results.

Re:Plasmon optical platters

[Anonymous Coward]

what language is this post written in ? babelfish has a fit trying to translate it....

Unless I'm mistaken...

[swaic]

Is the caddy finally back to put an end to scratched Disks?

Unless I'm mistaken, drives don't scratch disks, so having a caddy won't mean and end to scratched disks. If I recall correctly a caddy wasn't exactly cheap and most people only had a few which were shared among many disks.

Re:Unless I'm mistaken...

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you won't mind if I pour this sand onto your loading tray...

(Slot-loaders are actually the worst. Just get one piece of grit stuck in the soft brush/foam stuff designed to prevent grit from getting in... and some of those designs use rollers inside that run right along the label/data surfaces of the disc.)

Re:Unless I'm mistaken...

[Anonymous Coward]

Drives don't scrath disks?

Most of the time you are right, but cd drives, espiecally high speed ones (above 40x or so) are very fragile. Andif they come out of balance they can scratch or even explode a CD.

Design flaw..

[Anonymous Coward]

These disks have a major design flaw that makes them pretty much useless in the real world. In the center-back there is a hole that provides the drive access to spin the disk.
This hole isn't covered by anything and it isn't uncommon for dust to come into the disk and impede the reading of data off it.
Ever wonder why minidiscs are sold in cases?

USB 1.1

[Bram Stolk]

MO technology is obsolete.
However, USB 1.1 is even more obsolete.
This Fujitsu drive makes no sense, even if
it had sATA, firewire, scsi or USB2.0.

why bother

[p51d007]

I quit using floppies a couple years ago, I quit using zip drives last year. Flopticals I gave up a lot longer ago (windows 3.11 age). If I need backup, it's to DVD, for floppy type applications, I use a pen drive, keychain drive, or whatever you want to call them. EEPROM flash memory is my choice for portable storage.

MO drives?

[ultrapenguin]

One word: hahaha.
One link: http://pepper.idge.net/whatswrong/mo/
Please, move along.

Re:MO drives?

[Black Acid]

When a 24x CDRW drive costs less than $100, when blank CDR/RW media can be had for $10 for a 50 pack, when even USB/SCSI/Firewire external CDRW drives are available for less than $200, japs still use MO drives.

WHY?

Because its jap. They love the feeling of backing up their data to a MO drive. They love to pay close to $500 for an external SCSI, IDE, or USB unit. When your PC doesn't have a SCSI card, you buy the most expensive SCSI card so that you can connect the MO drive to it.

But best of all, you buy a new PC with CDRW drive built in, and you STILL special-order a SCSI card and an external MO drive. Now THAT is true idiocy

The Japanese may have the last laugh. MO's last longer because of the air-tight media, and can withstand about a million rewrites according to the article, while CD-Rs can only handle about a thousand. I don't know who needs that many rewritings, but the reliability and longetivity of magneto-optical drives sure is attractive.

Re:MO drives?

[Anonymous Coward]

WOW!!! Funny thing is I know the person who wrote that. TIMECOP. He is very anti-Japan(ese) and yet still lives in Japan.

Re:MO drives?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not so much the airtightness. It that the compounds just don't react to UV, or much of anything, except when properly heated beyond the curie point. (At which point, you're probably 'baking' any oxygen that snuck in out anyway, but I'm not a chemist or materials engineer.)

Re:MO drives?

[Silicon_Knight]

One word, because it's *Jap*?

What a crock of racist bullshit. Do you bash people that drive a Honda or a Toyota too because it's Jap?

MO drives are technically superior for data archival. I've owned one for years - the damn drive died before I had a single piece of media failure - and it died because my asshole of a landlady tossed it into the trash for me then dumped charcoal dust over it. I've had the drive since 1997, it was at one time a nightly incremental backup system for me. The drive was a Fujitsu Dynamo 640.

Every Fujitsu drive out there was fully backward compartible. My drive could read and write the very first 128Mb MO Disc. Their 2.3Gb unit can read and write every MO standard there ever was. Try that with any other optical media. It required no special drivers under every OS that I've played with (Windows 9X, NT and 2K, Linux, my friend's BeOS box), and it's just treated as a drive - no need to "rewrite" the disc like a CDRW, no need for specialized write software like a DVD-R/RW, CD-R, RW, etc. A simple cron entry that tar and cp /home was all it took for making nightly backups.

I have read somewhere that MO is the media of choice for the Japanese government. I am not surprised. Maybe they like their data to last longer. Yeah, back then I was poor, but I sprang for an Adaptec SCSI card and plugged my MO drive into it. To me that investment was a defining point going from average joe user to being somewhat of a sysadmin where I actually cared about the longetivity of my data. It was the difference between "fun toys" and "professional gear", at least in my mind.

Why did it never catch on in the US? Lack of marketing and media cost, would be my guess. Minidisc didn't catch on because the RIAA lobbied (and boy did they lobby hard) for the longest time and when they finally suceeded they got the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA) of 1992, which for a while made big companies nervous about releasing a format that can be used for BOTH music recording *and* computer data storage. Sony intentionally never built a MiniDisc computer drive because of this, which allowed Iomega and their crappy ZIP drives to take over. Think about that one - Minidiscs held 128Mbs - this was back in 1992 or so, and in Asian countries, the discs were US$2.00 each. They are reliable as all hell, no "Clicks of death". Had a computer version of that been released, it would have blown Iomega away. Even when Minidiscs were finally released in the US, the costs (back in the 90s) were highway robbery! The same is true with MO discs today. Those discs don't cost more than US$7.50 a pop in Hong Kong. For some reason, maybe because of its rarity and because American distributors can get away with charging more, they do just that.

-=- Terence

Re:MO drives?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck off and die, scum.
If you hate Japan so much, why don't you leave?

Re:MO drives?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you care?
does it bother you personally?
Maybe if I wont leave I'll nip off a couple more japs (haha, get it, nip off)

Japs are still dumber than gay niggers.

Propz to GNAA

MO drives.

[sirinek]

A handful of us in the Chicago Linux Users Group got these drives for free THREE YEARS AGO (fall 2000) for testing them out under Linux and giving feedback on them.

Mine's collected dust ever since. Media was like $20 a pop. For 640MB (?!?!) No thanks. I did tell them this too.

When I saw this article posted I was hoping they had a new model that had a larger storage capacity.

Let's play Boner Wars

[Anonymous Coward]

Zwwwwwip! Zwwwwwwip! We're light sabers!

Sir Haxalot: (mine is just floppy and not making cool noises)

DUDE!! THAT is just SO SAD!!

Sir Sucksalot: I suspect I am on the wrong side of the force.

You've got increase your floppy stiffness, I mean density.

WEHT holographic storage?

[Anonymous Coward]

It was all over PC mags in 1991...

interesting article

[Satanboy]

I have a magneto oprtical scsi array at my house witha few discs. I found that as reliable as the machine was, I did end up getting bad disks sometimes.
after about a year of using this machine as a backup server for small files (it only held 1.3 gigs total) one of the drives died in the machine.
the funny thing is, I have a hard drive from 1993 that still works fine and dandy.
I found the magneto disks just seemed to go bad over time and when my drive blew it was completely not worth the money to fix. If I bought a new magento drive, it would cost over a thousand dollars to replace for this model.
I think for 650 megs of storage I'll burn 2 cd roms for 20 cents and keep em in seperate locations.

so yeah, magneto optical is dead in my view, too expensive and its really not any more reliable than anything else out there.

thems my two cents :-)

MO drives DID catch on.

[aussersterne]

Um... Your definition of "catch on" and mine must be different. I don't think something needs to be in every single PC in order to have caught on.

A product that has become indispensible and widely owned within its intended niche has "caught on" and MO certainly did that. Among digital archivists and many businesses with serious data integrity needs, MO has been the absolute standard for many years now. MO drives are in the wild all over the place and the disks (both 3.5" and 5.25", all generally backward compatible) are easy to order and available from multiple sources-- just not at retail, because naturally that's not the target market. But then try to get an 8mm data cartridge at retail. Or a DDS-4 cartridge.

It's not a consumer technology, and never was intended to be, as is evidenced by cost. It's too robust to be a consumer technology. For the average household, there's no need for a $100 disk with glass substrate and a rigid part-aluminum casing, as many of our MO disks have.

The same goes for MiniDisc... It's everywhere in some circles. In field research, I know a lot of people who use them for interviewing because they're convenient, easy to (digitally) label, CD-quality, and it's easy to shuffle tracks around, etc. A lot of studio guys also use it in cocert with (or in some cases even instead of!) DAT for audio recordings. And the bootleg crowd absolutely loves MiniDisc as well.

And MiniDisc CAN be bought at your local store. At least where I live... Just walk into a department store and check the electronics section... A few portable CD players and a few MiniDisc players. How is that a market failure?

Again, I think the only reason there isn't more consumer adoption is cost. A portable CD player costs the same as pizza delivery. A minidisc player costs the average guy half his paycheck.

In any case, I think it's very simplistic to suggest that if a technology doesn't become as widespread as TV, it's been a market failure... although technologies that were once successful in their niche can eventually fade if a competitor comes along. I think that's what's happening to MO now, largely thanks to DVD-RAM, which represents a kind of compromise between the high cost of MO and the cheaper but less reliable consumer optical formats. I know that we have switched to (and I have bought for myself) 9.6GB DVD-RAM units because the disks are still protected and random-access, but are considerably less expensive and require less physical storage space than 5.25" MO.

But the same thing still holds true... DVD-RAM is becoming more and more widely deployed as an archive medium, and meanwhile generally any DVD-R/RW story on Slashdot is 25% full of posts making fun of DVD-RAM as though it were already a dead technology, just because people don't know any friends who have one in their gaming box.

MO is obsolete

[agw]

As is backup, archiving and reliable storing of important information. Isn't it?

I've used a 640MB 3.5" drive with 30+ disks for some years.
I think it's one of the most reliable way to store information.

At least more reliable than two IBMs in a RAID-1, a CD/DVD backup to cheap media after two years or a magnetic tape left on a loudspeaker or TV.

And it (was) even way cheaper than ZIP. IIRC after the 10th 120 MB ZIP disk, MO was way cheaper.

ZIP worked out, because iOmega made the drive and was (at first) the only media supplier.
That's not possible with all these official ISO standards around MO.

They'll keep trying!

[Anonymous Coward]

When I first saw the headline I thought to myself, "what, is this 1995 all over again?" It seems like I've been hearing about these things every couplefew years ever since CDROMs became prevalent. Maybe even back to Bernoulli Box days.

This is consumer electronics flap-dashery. Try and get "everyone" into the idea rather than just settling on some niche market. Maybe these new ones have DRM in them or something to make them relevant to today's consumer, but it's just another case of R&D puffery.

How to avoid scratched discs...

[Kymermosst]

Should be obvious but...

USE A JEWEL CASE!

Re:How to avoid scratched discs...

[zakezuke]

Should be obvious but...

USE A JEWEL CASE!

Jewel cases are FAR too fragile. You look at it funny and it breaks. floppies on the otherhand could take a touch more impact.

Also, your media often times doesn't actually come with a jewel case.

Re:How to avoid scratched discs...

[zackeller]

I agree, Jewel cases are way too fragile. I backup all my cds onto ten brands of media (ten times), wrap them in bubble wrap and titanium, and scatter them to ten different countries (in case of natural disaster or political uprising). You can never be too careful.

Re:How to avoid scratched discs...

[Kymermosst]

Jewel cases are FAR too fragile. You look at it funny and it breaks. floppies on the otherhand could take a touch more impact.

Also, your media often times doesn't actually come with a jewel case.

I've always found that the spring in the 3.5" floppy's door mechanism is it's downfall.

You can get good jewel cases... I just got a box of 100 slim cases that are pretty sturdy.

The big deal about jewel cases is that the surface of the disc isn't in contact with anything. A lot of people I know use sleeves and whatnot... their discs wear out a lot faster.

Of course... I know people who don't use jewel cases at all. I had a friend send me some cds in the mail... 3 of them stacked together in a padded envelope. Well, all the bouncing and such in travel made one of them completely unreadable, and the other two so bad I had to spend time extracting the information and burn it to other discs.

Three slim jewel cases would have prevented this.

Re:How to avoid scratched discs...

[Wolfrider]

--You should also launch a set to the Moon, for *permanent* archival storage. JIC. Then go invest in whoever wins the X-prize so you can potentially retrieve your data some day.

;)

I don't understand the point

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been happily using my old 2.6gb DVD-RAM for years now, my new 4.7gb drive reads&writes all the original disks perfectly and the drive only cost GBP70 (about USD110).

Why would anyone bother with a 640mb drive? If it has to fit in a pocket get a USB drive.

MiniDisc big in Japan

[ashitaka]

Very true. Our current homestay student from Japn (we're in Vancouver) came here with the expectation to fill out her MD collection with some cheap North American titles. To her great dismay there's nothing available.

A step in the right direction...

[xanthines-R-yummy]

I think MO will not be the end-all data storage solution for valuable data, but it's a step in the right direction.

I work in a biomedical research lab and we have to keep data from years and years ago. This data represents several lifetimes of research and MUST be preserved. CD's and DVD's are too easily damaged and HDD's are too intricate to be reliable over long periods of use (MTBF's). Tapes are nice, but they are too slow during backups and restore, not to mention you normally have to use proprietary software which may or may not operate under future OS's. The tape systems that ARE fast, reliable, and capacious cost lots of money.

I think solid-state storage may be a viable option when the costs come down and the capacities go up. They aren't magnetic-based so the the magnetic particles or whatever don't spread after long periods of disuse(HDD's) and they don't rely on chemicals which degrade over time (CD/DVD -R's).

Sure MO is slow and bulky but in my limited experience it works very reliably and the media had a long shelf life, although pretty expensive. CDRs get scratches and just freak out sometimes. Zips also freak out for no reason. DVDRs would be cool if they were better protected and had some kind of standard (RAM? +/-? what the fsck is up with that!?).

BTW, Zip disks/drives are EVERYWHERE in academic medical research for some weird reason.

Re:A step in the right direction...

[Mr.Spaz]

I used to do QA for a company that wrote MO jukebox control software (MDI, anyone?), and I'll have to burst your bubble on reliability and shelf life there. Generally the disks were fine, but if you used them extensively (probably not an issue in your situation, since you're going for archiving), they would eventually begin to break down, losing the ability to be re-written, eventually culminating in a disk full of "unwritable" spots that had to be chucked in the bin.

As far as archiving goes, well, maybe it's not so bad as I paint it, but they don't last forever just sitting on a shelf. It's true that you have more stability than standard magnetic media and dye-based (CDR) discs, but you must be very careful about temperature and humidity and still careful about magnetic fields. I have lots of MO carts that are going on 6 years old and I can still read them without a problem, BUT: I've had several disks lose data for no apparent reason. They were all stored together, in a temperature controlled environment away from magnetic fields and they still lost it. Of the 150 or so disks I started with, I've lost about 30. My advice would be to periodically verify and transfer data to new media to avoid that situation. I guess maybe 30 out of 150 isn't bad for 6 years worth of storage, but then I could stand to lose that data; can you stand to lose yours?

Re:A step in the right direction...

[WuphonsReach]

Digital media archives require care and feeding. They're not store and forget like paper archives are. You have to refresh the archive every few years or run a high risk of losing data. (Everyone argues about what the actual numbers are, but I'd say you'll want to verify content at least yearly.)

However, you have to have some method of verifying that the backup/archive data is still correct and readable. One option is a program that stores CRC/MD5 signatures of every file on the disk. Then you can check your data later against the signature files and verify that the disk is still readable.

A newer option is to use something like QuickPar. QuickPar analyzes a group of files, then creates recovery files which would allow the original data to be repaired if it gets damaged. It's an open source specification with ports to most platforms, so it will probably be around in 5 years. You can choose varying levels of paranoia such as being able to still recover your data even if 20% of the data files are trashed. The downside is that the recovery files require extra storage space (10% redundancy will result in recovery files that are around 12% of the original data's size).

Larger version

[mousse-man]

There are larger versions around. The current standard for archival media is 9.1 GB, either in WORM or MO format, and these media can be written by a real MO jukebox. Of course, you can put it 30 GB UDO drives that will give some more space when one multiplies it with the number of available slots....

Disk protection is an untapped market...

[MikShapi]

>> I imagine the reason [to cancel out caddies] was simply so the DVD drives could be backwards compatable with CDs.

Uh?
A Caddy-driven DVD drive today would be no less compatible with CDs than the x4 Yamaha caddy CD-burner that I have in the office. As long as a user can open his caddies, there's no compatibility issue.

Furthermore, nobody says you have to buy them sealed. Buy them on spindles and either own a caddy or two and swap'em (in which case it would probbably make more sense owning a tray or trayless drive) or, if you take protecting your data seriously, have a caddy for each disk, in which case those caddies may well be worth their weight in gold.

Today, the option's plain not there - not a single modern CD/CDR/DVD/DVD*R drive comes with a caddy or similar protection system that wraps your disk both on the shelf and in the drive. It's a shame, as I for one value my material enough to pay for the extra caddies. And my guess would be there's a whole market segment there that would.

Re:Disk protection is an untapped market...

[volkris]

Absolutely

MO IS NOT RELIABLE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Trust me on this. My dad invested heavily in MO disks when they first came out and used them for many years. We have old MOs floating around, ranging in size from 128mb to 1.3gb. He got them as a backup solution for his office, but a backup solution they aint. AT LEAST one-fourth (maybe even as many as half) of the disks he used (and I used at home) would go bad just sitting on the shelf! We would both be reformatting MOs all the time! Sorry, but ORB was a much better format, although it caught on even less than MOs.

Re:MO IS NOT RELIABLE!

[Wolfrider]

--I admit ORB looked slightly promising, but I had a horrible experience with the Syquest 1-gig SparQ drives (that's what I installed my first-ever Linux onto. Every single disk went bad within 2 months.) Then I found out that the same guys that sold the abortion known as SparQ had founded ORB, and stayed wisely away. Sparq disks were about the worst design I had ever seen.

X-Men

[Lord_Dweomer]

But........But......how do they shrink Magneto down to be little mutant size to fit into the drive? And I'm sure Cyclops won't enjoy being stuck in there with him.

end of life in 1998

[cdn-programmer]

As far as I know those drives were end of life as of about 1998. And I should know because my company was a Fujitsu dealer specializing in this technology and I own the company.

I guess I'llhave to call Fujitsu up tomorrow and see if they re-introduced them.

Damn fine drives actually - very reliable. I still use them.

Also - Panasonic has similar technology in their PD drives. Fujitsu is 3 1/2" media while panason is 5 1/4".

Re:end of life in 1998

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, except you're either BSing or don't know your own products well, because PD is PD, and MO is MO.

Hint: One uses magnets. The other doesn't, and is now called a CD-RW.

The most important feature of the MO disk

[Ilan Volow]

You can comfortably put one in your pocket.

One of the biggest reasons why floppies are still so widely used is that you can easily put several (inside a carrying case, of course) in your pocket and not feel too encumbered when you walk around or sit down.

I can only surmise that the standardization on CD/DVD rewritables was a secret plot by the cargo pants industry to increase sales.

Re:The most important feature of the MO disk

[TheLink]

How about: miniDVD+RW.

1.5GB storage, can be used just like a floppy disk.

What about boot disks?

[Rangsk]

So far, there is no true "floppy killer" when it comes to making boot disks. My laptop does not have a floppy drive, and it has caused me much annoyance - I can't update the firmware for any of my hardware. I also can't use those auto-boot disk tools for a virus scan or other recovery disks.

I have tried various methods with making a boot CD, however they tend to fail because these firmware updating programs like to read/write to the floppy... and it obviously fails to write to a CD. These methods also tend to require the use of another computer that does have a floppy in order to create the boot CD.

As for a USB memory card... it probably has the same or even more problems than making a boot CD. Good luck getting your BIOS to boot from that and have the ability to read/write to it.

Re:What about boot disks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Many of the newer BIOS (my 2 year old Athlon for instance) can boot from USB memory drives. CF cards in a USB reader do not work, though.

It would have to be formatted fat16 to update firmware, I suspect, however.

Hierarchical Storage Management

[good soldier svejk]

In my industry, the law requires us to keep every scrap of data for 30 years. Some of this data may actually need retrieval for business purposes after years of dormancy. Other data is fire and forget, but the law still dictates we retain it. We need our data to transparently migrate from online storage (i.e. EMC DMX or HP XP) to secondary storage (i.e. EMC Clarion, HP EVA), to nearline storage (tape), based on content and age. Much of the nearline is for all intents and purposes archived. Since our archive requirement is pushing the limits of tape life, we really need to refresh tape media at least once in the data lifecycle. That adds painful complexity and cost to the process. MO and WORM (write once read many) optical frames are the only formats I know of which meets our archive criteria right out of the box. Hell, they're even EMP resistant.

One vendor recommended MO and pointed to a large customer using it.

MO workflow reconsidered

[comma]

Depends on the kind of work you do whether you find MOs useful or not. MO's greatest advantage is that it lets you overwrite just a few KBs on a disc with just your really new data, i.e. MOs behave like hard drives do and floppies or Zips did -- and CDs won't. How's that for a time saver? Because MOs were consistently overpriced in the US (on average 400 percent more than in Japan) only those disgusted with the intrinsic substandard security of Zip media used MO. So if you hate incremental CD clutter and prefer CD-RW over CD for backups, MO might still beat CD-RW for comfort when you work with text or small databases. After your project is complete -- write it straight from your 640 MB MO to CD.

Size

[evilroot]

You know, at first glance I hailed this as an answer to many of the problems I've been having lately with scratched CDs. I do a lot of video encoding work, and thus am constantly carrying around CDs.

Then I saw the size. Unfortunately, most of the stuff I do is sized specifiaclly to fit on a 700mb CD. As is just about everyone else's stuff. So, unless they plan on changing the size that's the reason I won't buy one. Sad, really.

Longevity

[Anonymous Coward]

I still have an old MO drive, and it works fine. Reads CD-R (not RW) at 6x, though I have no MO media...
Was given it free when we replaced the Pentium Pro computers they came in...so how long ago was that? 5, 6 years? And the most common media is still 640MB?

I rule

[Anonymous Coward]

I simply am the coolest person ever

If you don't have a burner on this machine...

[yerricde]

Not all computers that you come in contact with will be able to write to CD-RW discs. More can write to generic USB storage than to CD-RW. Heck, older CD-ROM drives produced up until USB became widespread can't even read CD-RW.

CD-RW, on the other hand, is more likely to be bootable than USB storage.

And open up your computer?

[yerricde]

Now how's [multiple hard disks] for data security (not to mention redundancy) compared to one single overpriced MO disk?

You generally have to open the case to install the cheap HDs because ATA is not designed to be used externally (unless, of course, it's CompactFlash). Last time I checked, FireWire and high-speed USB HDs were quite a bit more expensive than ATA internal HDs.

MD Data

[yerricde]

Had a computer version of that been released, it would have blown Iomega away.

There was an "MD Data" format. MacUser reviewed it and rejected it because of its floppy-esque 40 KB/s transfer rate.

Long Term Archival Storage?

[bhima]

One of my greatest needs is reliable long term storage. Floppies have the long term format benefit, but are too small and too unreliable to be of use. Zip drives are too small, have the COD and the format is somewhat impractical (it's time consuming to setup a PC which doesn't have one already). CD-R & CD-RW are almost big enough, but they make me nervous. I've heard stories of them becoming unreadable after sitting about for a few years. A raid array is impractical, because I don't need all of this data constantly available.

Re:Long Term Archival Storage?

[Wolfrider]

--The best real-world solution that I've been able to work out so far, is to just buy another HD of the same size or larger, and store it in a safe place after backup.

o I've dealt with tapes, they're not a good solution for the average desktop consumer.

o DVD is falling in price and will store 4GB+, but standards have yet to be sorted out (however you can get drives that do both + and -) and the media life is still questionable.

o I wouldn't recommend CDR for long term because the media is easily scratched and a pain to back up to.

--BTW, Iomega is making 750MB Zip disks now, and COD hasn't been a problem for years. I have four Zip drives, (2) parallel, (1) internal IDE, (1) USB, and all work perfectly.

clicky

DVD/Adio CD Caddys

[FreekyGeek]

The stupidest thing in the world (for consumers) is that DVDs and audio CDs don't use caddys. Having a caddy (i.e., put the disc in a sealed cartridge) would prevent just about all damage from scratching.

Of course, the entertainment industry WANTS you to damage your discs so you have to buy new ones, so it's in their best interest to make them as vulnerable as possible.

It would be great of manufacturers made DVD and audio CD players that used caddys, but it would never catch on enough with the public without a huge marketing campaign. Really, this is something the public should be demanding, but as usual the public is dumber than dirt.

Re:DVD/Adio CD Caddys

[Wolfrider]

--I agree with you 101%. The only drawback would be the extra storage space required, but the drive footprint could essentially stay the same. It would have been best if the media manufacturing companies had made every disk like a floppy, with an *integrated* caddy. Then they could put all the info that's currently on the clamshell cases onto the caddy.

--Ah, we live in wasted times.

MO was my worst purchase

[MacFreek]

Well, I certainly hope these MO drives are more reliable then the older ones. About five years ago, I believed the claim that MO was more reliable then plain hard disks. This was in the time that a 700 MB harddisk did cost me $350. So I bought a Maxtor MO driver for over $1000. It did work great for a year, and I expected my data was more safe then on a HD, because these things where in caddies and reading was done optical, instead of magentical. I was wrong, after about a year, the disks got bad sectors without warning. About the same happened half a year to my dad who also got a MO drive. It was plainly the worst hardware I ever bought. Period.

Nowadays, I use a hard disk for daily backups (just a second 120 GB disk), and DVD's for monthly backup, which I just put in a box in an other building.

So far, I never had problems. When I expect one of my drives is starting to fail, I just replace it. A 120 GB disk is so cheap nowadays. And Disks are so lovely fast (and it can be automated, since there is no tape to be mounted manually). For corporate backups, I would probably just use 2 DVD's, and store them in seperate locations in well conditioned rooms.

It might be bad faith, but nowadays I just wouldn't trust an MO anymore. Sorry if that does wrong on the improved reliability.

And as a side note

[CrystalFalcon]

And as a side note, it would also quadruple the manufacturing costs per disc, and introduce nifty moving parts that can break down instead.

Plus, it takes much more storage space!

No, I don't think caddies would have been a brilliant idea. Not for the mass-market product.

Re:And as a side note

[FreekyGeek]

Quadruple the cost? I strongly doubt that. From where did you get this number? I have a feeling I don't want to know 'cause it's a Smelly Place.

Moving parts? What, one spring? In any case, it would be trivial to design a case that could be opened and changed if something broke.

As for storage, a CD in a caddy is no bigger than a CD in a jewel box.