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

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]

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?

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.

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

[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

[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: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

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.

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.