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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?"
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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.
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
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.
http://www.fsckin.com/
I can see the slogans now... "Magneto-Optical! Floppy drive size, floppy drive speed."
(go for the USB 2.0 version)
Good impression, but low performance
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
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?
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.
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.
Liberated women don't wear parachute bloomers!
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?
The more I know, the more I know I don't know.
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?
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
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?
Hate me!
Because the media doesn't die if you look at it funny.
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.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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?
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....
Fujitsu have had this tech out for over two years. But sadly, outside of Japan, hardly anyone has heard about it.
/. 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.
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
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.
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.
-- john
This website has likely everything you need: http://www.dvdrhelp.com/capture.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Here's a nice link for those who have no clue what you're talking about:
What IS the "Click of Death"?
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.
This sig was generated by a barrel of trained kittens for SeXy_Red (550409).
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.
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.
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
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.
One word: hahaha.
One link: http://pepper.idge.net/whatswrong/mo/
Please, move along.
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.
Because the media doesn't die if you look at it funny.
Who the hell uses cats to store data anymore anyways?
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
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.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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.
Should be obvious but...
USE A JEWEL CASE!
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
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.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
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.
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....
>> 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.
-
yea jewel cases are way better.
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".
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.
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.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
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.
"Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose." --Douglas Adams
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.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
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.
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.
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.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
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.
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, 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.
--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.
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??