It's MO time ☺

[SophieRose]

Got this.. hooked it up to the IIfx and.. wow what a cool format. ☺


Gonna have to make an external case for it.. am thinking transparent orange acrylic..

 

[Unknown_K]

Yes, they are. I have an external dual 5.25" bay SCSI enclosure connected to one of my IIfx machines. One drive is a 1.3GB MO and the other is a TEAC 6x CDR.

For a while there I was snatching up MO drives for a few of my old PCs and Macs. The drives are no longer cheap.

 

[MrFahrenheit]

I love MO!

Another cool feature of 3.5” is the labels are the same as floppy disk labels, so you can print custom labels for them like these.



The 5.25” format is kind of “weird”. The disks are double-sided like old records or cassette tapes. So you have to flip to access the other half of the reported capacity of the disk. So 9.1GB is actually 4.5GB allowed per side.

The 3.5” is definitely a cooler format though. Availability of SCSI, USB (native), ATAPI, and Firewire drives makes them very universal.

Add to that, even the highest capacity 2.3GB drive can read AND write to the lowest capacity media, 128MB.

I don’t know if it’s something to do with the sector size or just the process I used, but it’s fairly easy to image a CD image over to a MO disk and use it just like a CD. This includes bootable disks. I was able to make a bootable A/UX install MO disk.

If you get into 5.25” be aware that not all disks and drives are compatible.

Check out this post: https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/using-magneto-optical-drives-on-vintage-68k-macs.38010/

 

[olePigeon]

They also fit in the 3.5" plastic cases, so you can make some slip covers for them, too. I think nowadays they're marketed as "calendar cases," but they were originally for floppy disks.

If you have an FWB JackHammer SCSI card, you'll want to apply the 3.2.6 patch, otherwise it won't be able to read the larger disks with 2048 and 4096 byte sectors.

 

[Unknown_K]

I have a 3.5" 230MB MO as well which I rarely use.

 

[LaPorta]

I've never even seen one in real life.

 

[Unknown_K]

If you started collecting 20 years ago you would have seen all kinds of stuff that rarely gets seen today, guess I was just lucky.

 

[LaPorta]

I had old macs all my life and started getting my collection in the late 90s. I guess maybe they just weren’t popular where I was!

 

[Fizzbinn]

I love MO!

Another cool feature of 3.5” is the labels are the same as floppy disk labels, so you can print custom labels for them like these.

View attachment 64595View attachment 64596View attachment 64597

The 5.25” format is kind of “weird”. The disks are double-sided like old records or cassette tapes. So you have to flip to access the other half of the reported capacity of the disk. So 9.1GB is actually 4.5GB allowed per side.

The 3.5” is definitely a cooler format though. Availability of SCSI, USB (native), ATAPI, and Firewire drives makes them very universal.

Add to that, even the highest capacity 2.3GB drive can read AND write to the lowest capacity media, 128MB.

I don’t know if it’s something to do with the sector size or just the process I used, but it’s fairly easy to image a CD image over to a MO disk and use it just like a CD. This includes bootable disks. I was able to make a bootable A/UX install MO disk.

If you get into 5.25” be aware that not all disks and drives are compatible.

Check out this post: https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/using-magneto-optical-drives-on-vintage-68k-macs.38010/

I love this. Those disks look so cool!

Where do you get your labels? I bought a pack of new old stock Avery floppy disk labels off eBay but the adhesive is very week...

 

[Unknown_K]

They were never common, mostly used to store medical documents and pictures/scans and other high value items. Everybody had a zip drive around here and quite a few had Bernoulli, SyQuest and Jaz drives.

 

[Phipli]

I only saw zip and SyQuest back in the 90s.

 

[LaPorta]

Everyone and his brother it seemed had a Zip. I’ve got a built in Jaz now, but I’d only seen them in MacWarehouse and the like before then.

 

[ClassicGuyPhilly]

SyQuest in 44MB and 88MB were well used at the ad agency I was at in the late 90s until Zip 100s became the new standard. I only knew one person with a Jaz, he used it for downloading, um, shall we say content? off the alt.binaries newsgroups while working at our ISP. (totally diff world back then!)

 

[MrFahrenheit]

I love this. Those disks look so cool!

Where do you get your labels? I bought a pack of new old stock Avery floppy disk labels off eBay but the adhesive is very week...

Thanks. I got them on eBay but they’re dated recently on the back. I don’t have them handy but it was like only 5 years old or so.

I’ve seen some old stock ones on eBay that are from the 80s and I’d imagine they are no longer sticky.

I just bought another batch on eBay so I don’t run out and I’m waiting for them to arrive.

I print these on my Xerox dye sublimation printer, which gives good consistent vibrant colors, with a slight surface texture (kind of like how business cards feel).

 

[LaPorta]

SyQuest in 44MB and 88MB were well used at the ad agency I was at in the late 90s until Zip 100s became the new standard. I only knew one person with a Jaz, he used it for downloading, um, shall we say content? off the alt.binaries newsgroups while working at our ISP. (totally diff world back then!)

All I have to say about that is....1 or 2 GB per Jaz disk....used for that, with modem download speeds....I can't even imagine.

 

[ClassicGuyPhilly]

Not modem download speeds, @LaPorta . This was from the ISP offices. We had between DS3 and OC3 to 4 of the 5 US NAPs that existed at the time (Mae East, Mae West, PacBell, and NY NAP). The 1GB platters were filled at speeds most consumers wouldn't see until years later.

 

[Unknown_K]

Most of the warez servers back in the day were hidden at universities because of the bandwidth.

 

[MrFahrenheit]

In 1995 I got a Zip drive to replace what I was using floppy disks for. I had a 170MB hard drive and had about 500 floppy disks. I archived them over to Zip disks for a lot cheaper than a bigger hard drive.

Then in 1996 I purchased a 1GB Jaz drive and ditched the Zip. Around the same time I purchased a Yamaha 2x CDR drive and archived all of my floppy images to CDR.

 

[Dude.JediKnight]

This guy is the first thing I think of when I hear the word MO, though I was today years old when I realized it’s actually M-O, short for “Microbe Obliterator.” The more you know, I guess.


But seriously…


Never owned or used a MO drive. I know NeXT machines used MO, but not much beyond that. Are MO drives reliable? No ‘click of death’ issues like Zip drives were known to have? What about the disks?

I’m guessing back in the day that MO disks cost more than Zip 100 disks, but was it at least a similar cost per MB? I would have to assume they were ideally meant for archival and backup purposes, or were they durable enough to be used daily like you would a true HDD?

Seems like they didn’t have widespread adoption, thus why I never really see drives or disks on the secondhand market. It really sounds like a MO drive and disks would be useful to have, but probably not worth the premium it would cost to acquire the drives and media yourself at today’s prices.

 

[Unknown_K]

The NEXT drives were unreliable because of capacitors leaking, I think. The 1.3GB and 2.6GB 5.25" drives seem to be reliable but the later 4.6/9.2GB drives were utter crap and the company (Maxoptix) making them went bankrupt.

I find the media to be 100% reliable because you need heat from a laser and a magnetic field to change bits plus the are enclosed in a hard shell and can't be scratched like a CDR/W could.