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Data Storage Hardware Technology

Magneto-Optical Drives Reviewed 179

Posted by timothy from the yesterday's-tech-today dept.
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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Magneto-Optical Drives Reviewed More

Magneto-Optical Drives Reviewed

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  • I remember (Score:2, Informative)

    by Sir Haxalot ( 693401 )
    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 [ebuyer.com] beauties.

    • Re:I remember (Score:1, Informative)

      by after ( 669640 )
      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)
      • Actually, Sir Haxalot was talking about The Floptical [computerhope.com] 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.

    • 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.
      • 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.
    • 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 an

  • MO Drives. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by anakin357 ( 69114 ) on Sunday October 19, 2003 @08:57AM (#7253442) Homepage
    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. (Score:3, Informative)

      by Detritus ( 11846 )
      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.
    • 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 d

      • Re:MO Drives. (Score:1, Interesting)

        by 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

        • Re:MO Drives. (Score:2, Interesting)

          by amRadioHed ( 463061 )
          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 easil
      • 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. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 )
      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.
      • 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 dust
        • 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.

      • > 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 h
        • 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.
        • 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. Rec
    • The Zip disk never caught on? Inexcpliciably, it did. But why didn't the Jaz disk?
      • 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
        • 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.
    • 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 c
    • > 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.

  • 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)

    • 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 [google.com]
  • Good impression, but low performance
  • 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?
    • 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 on
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • 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 c

  • God I hope so... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by The Governor ( 686712 ) on Sunday October 19, 2003 @09:08AM (#7253488)
    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... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Crolis ( 697068 )
      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 prote
      • I imagine the reason was simply so the DVD drives could be backwards compatable with CDs.
        • >> 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

      • 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 na

  • Im sticking to my DVD-R (Score:4, Insightful)

    by adeyadey ( 678765 ) on Sunday October 19, 2003 @09:13AM (#7253505) Journal
    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?
    • This website has likely everything you need: http://www.dvdrhelp.com/capture [dvdrhelp.com].

  • Ah, yes (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dark Lord Seth ( 584963 ) on Sunday October 19, 2003 @09:20AM (#7253526) Journal

    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Dot.Com.CEO ( 624226 ) * on Sunday October 19, 2003 @09:25AM (#7253543)
      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 (Score:2, Insightful)

      by shione ( 666388 )
      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 (Score:2, Interesting)

      by doj8 ( 542402 )
      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 reli
    • 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 (Score:2, Interesting)

      by rufey ( 683902 )
      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 wa

    • 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
    • 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

  • 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?
    • 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 prot
    • 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.
  • 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 u
    • 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.
      • 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 :)
    • 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?
      • 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
        • 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)
  • Fujitsu have had this tech out for over two years [fujitsu.com]. 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 advan
    • 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".

      • 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?
        • 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 :-)

    • 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
  • 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 1

  • 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.
  • 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/ [idge.net]
    Please, move along.

    • 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

    • 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 Fuj
  • 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.

  • 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
  • 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) t
  • Should be obvious but...

    USE A JEWEL CASE!

    • 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.
      • 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
  • 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

    • 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 i
  • 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.... [plasmon.com]
  • 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.

  • 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".

  • The most important feature of the MO disk (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Ilan Volow ( 539597 ) on Sunday October 19, 2003 @04:30PM (#7255733) Homepage
    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.
  • 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 d
    • --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
  • 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 wit
    • 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.
      • 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.
    • --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.

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