Ring Out The Old, Ring In The New - magneto-optical disk drives and CD-RW drives - Technology Information

Computer Technology Review, Jan, 2001 by Hal Glatzer

I'm dropping 3.5-inch MO now, once and for all. For seven years I've made good use of the format, starting with a 230MB drive which, in 1996, I traded up for a 640MB internal SCSI drive. I've got about 30 MO disks on my shelf now, mainly storing images from my digital camera and old newsletter layouts. Also, until 1998 when I got CD-R, I used 3.5inch MO media to back up my HDD logical drives.

But last March my MO drive started to come apart-literally. The outer door slipped off one of its spring-loaded hinges. I phoned Tech Support at Fujitsu's U.S. headquarters in San Jose, CA and was told to simply remove the door because it's there only to keep dust out. So I did that. But in December the inner door slipped a hinge too, and slumped at an angle. The drive stopped working- with a disk inside. The manual told me to release the disk by poking a straightened-out paper clip into the little hole beside the Eject button. So I did that. But then I couldn't insert a disk: it would go only part-way in, could not be read or written-to, and had to be manually ejected.

I knew that the drive was out of warranty. But what I didn't know was: there are no actual technicians in Fujitsu's U.S. Tech Support office-no one who could even talk me through a physical examination over the phone. The drive, they said, would have to go to Japan, for a repair that would cost at least $300.

As you can imagine, I found that unacceptable. I asked to speak to a supervisor and volunteered to rent an external MO drive for a few days, so I could offload my files for safekeeping. But not only does Fujitsu have no MO technicians in the U.S., they apparently have no "loaner" drives here either.

Desperate to recover my files, I worked up the courage to open my computer and remove the drive from its slot. To my surprise, the missing inner-door spring had wedged itself just inside the loading mechanism. And once I extracted it, the drive worked fine again-albeit without either of its two doors. I immediately copied every one of my MO disk files onto CD-R media before any new mishap could occur.

3.5-inch MO served me well for seven years. And I've always thought that it might have been the great leap forward from the floppy when it first appeared ten years ago with 128MB capacity. But none of the manufacturers forwardpriced it then; and very few users outside of Japan were willing to pay the freight: $1,800 for the drive and $30 for a 128MB disk. (Fujitsu was never the sole manufacturer; it's merely the last one standing.) By the mid1990s, when capacity had gone up to 230MB, and the drive price fell to a more reasonable $800, Iomega launched Zip-a $300 drive with 100MB, $10 media-and the rest is history.

So I'm singing "Aloha Oe" to 3.5-inch MO and assigning all of its functions to DYD-RAM.

Ring In The New

Elsewhere on the MO front Sony has released its longawaited 9.1GB 5.25-inch MO system. And Plasmon has announced support for the higher-capacity drives and media in its M-series jukeboxes.

That said, however, it must be obvious to all concerned that MO has reached the end of its design life. * MO capacity doubled every two years since the early 1990s, but can do so no longer. Don't get me wrong: the newest drives read legacy media; and nobody should get rid of any storage system that works just because something newer and groovier has come along.

But there's no room for more gigabytes on 5.25-inch MO media, nor is there any room for more megabytes on 3.5-inch MO disks. 9.1GB and 1.3GB, respectively, are the end of the line for magnetooptic systems as presently constituted-that is, with full backward-compatibility. The future of optical disk technology, I believe, lies with phase-change: specifically CDRW at the low-capacity end, and DVD-recordables at the high end.

Speaking of CD-RW, there's a teapot-size tempest you should be aware of when you're spec'ing "high-speed" rewritable media for new drives. Rewriting has always been the slowpoke compared to write-once recording. While CD-R burning has reached 12X speed and may already be faster by the time this column is published, CD-RW rewriting has been stuck at about 4X speed.

So manufacturers started tweaking the relationship between their drives' constant linear velocity (CLV) and constant angular velocity (CAV) functions, and have thereby pushed rewriting up to 8X and 12X. Trouble is: those speeds are achievable only with special "high-speed" media that can't be written 5 (at all!) in older, slower drives.

The new, faster-rated disks are supposed to be labeled as such; but unless integrators and system vendors (not to mention retailers) keep them separate from the older, slower media, users will always want the "fastest" disks for their drives-and they could be mightily disappointed when they try to use them.

They might even decide to move up to DVD-RAM.