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LaCie MO 230 drive for PB 190 or 5300
- Thread starter Charadis
- Start date
tanaquil
Well-known member
MO should stand for magneto-optical, which is an old type of tape/disk backup (I think MO disks did look a bit like floppy disks). Kind of like a zip drive but different media, only used for backup AFAIK. Won't be much use to you unless you can get your hands on some MO tapes (disks?). I have no idea how difficult that is, never tried it. Interesting to see one though!
olePigeon
Well-known member
It's old-ish, but not ancient. Fujitsu manufactured new MO drives up until 2006 (?) The largest being 9.2 GBs on 5.25" disks. I have a couple 2.3GB 3.5" drives, and they're fantastic. They look like slightly thicker floppy disks, but with a hard platter inside. Fantastic for storage and backup.
The disks aren't hard to get ahold of, but can sometimes be expensive. It's best to hold out and look for a good deal on disks. The 230 MB drive should be able to read and write both 230 and 128 MB disks. Just make sure you're buying 3.5" media and not 5.25" media.
The disks aren't hard to get ahold of, but can sometimes be expensive. It's best to hold out and look for a good deal on disks. The 230 MB drive should be able to read and write both 230 and 128 MB disks. Just make sure you're buying 3.5" media and not 5.25" media.
Trash80toHP_Mini
NIGHT STALKER
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc
Looks like you should be able to find some 3.5" media, making it far more useful than the MiniCD module of Independence Day fame. Zip drive for that bay is the ultimate upgrade.
edit: beat me to it oP! Have you ever found a 3.5" SCSI desktop unit for data transfer.
Looks like you should be able to find some 3.5" media, making it far more useful than the MiniCD module of Independence Day fame. Zip drive for that bay is the ultimate upgrade.
edit: beat me to it oP! Have you ever found a 3.5" SCSI desktop unit for data transfer.
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olePigeon
Well-known member
Yes, I have 2 desktop Fujitsu 2.3GB SCSI MO drives. They're in, appropriately enough, 2 external "ClubMac MO" SCSI cases I managed to find.
The drives themselves are surprisingly not expensive if you know where to look (see below.) It's the media that can kill ya. You just have to be part hawk and part ninja, and you can get a good deal on disks, too. I think I got a 5 pack of new 2.3 GB disks for $25, which is a steal since people like to sell them for at least $25 a disk for some reason (and as high as $50 a disk. :O )
I bought mine from this guy. He has hundreds of used drives: https://www.ebay.com/itm/FUJITSU-MCR3230SS-3-5-2-3-GB-SCSI-MAGNETO-OPTICAL-DRIVE/123146500499
He used to sell them for $20 a pop, but it looks like his prices have gone up. Still not bad. But it does have the Make an Offer option. Who knows?
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I had never heard of that medium before, strangely. It looked like a floppy drive, but I was intrigued by the "230MB." Knowing La Cie the company for their backup drives, I was kinda hoping for a floppy disk with built in flash storage! What was I thinking
I could definitely use something like that for saving information/files. Not sure how practical it would be, however, as I don't even have a 5300 or a 190. I do have a couple of 3400c computers that I'm working on though that I was hoping I could test this drive out on...I think the expansion floppy drive could be used from a 5300 if I remember correctly, but I wonder if drivers will be an issue.
Thanks for the heads up, I'll definitely keep 3.5" in mind when I'm searching for this stuff.
That link...I still have a Sony MiniDisc player! Ironically, I was just looking at Sony NH1 auctions recently. $299 and up is still a heavy price to swallow for me these days...
It's been a while since I've watched ID. I don't even remember that segment with the computer :O Funny thing, I used to have a VST Zip drive for the 3400c, was that compatible with the 5300 series? Threw it in with a broken 3400 I sold a while ago, buyer seemed pretty gracious about finding it in the computer.
Thanks for that link! Looks pretty affordable from here. And those are rewritable, which I'm all for!
The drive was pretty cheap, so I decided to take a chance on it without knowing much about it. Makes the second item I've bought so far on Mercari.
https://item.mercari.com/jp/m10367819220/
I appreciate all the information, guys!
Trash80toHP_Mini
NIGHT STALKER
Yes, the one I use with my 5300ce is tagged as a Zip 3400. The bays were designed to be compatible, the 3400 being a CD extension equipped mod of the 5300/190 standard.
Well, that’s good news! If your 3400c zip works in your 5300ce, then perhaps I should have no problem testing the MO drive in a 3400c!
I had contemplated finding another Zip drive while I still had a Kanga. It was nice and quick to transfer info between Macs. Don’t see them turn up so much on the Bay anymore
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At the time the ZIP drive became so popular Magneto optical had already been around for a while in lower capacities, but had reached the 640MB 3.5" format.
The MO cartridges were almost identical in size and weight to a ZIP cartridge and they cost about the same amount, but they held more than 5 times as much data. If you were using the MO for data storage, the media was cheaper by a factor of 5 - 6. If you just needed disks to exchange with clients and your files didn't get over ~100MB, then the large capacity was less useful
ZIP drives eventually settled into a price of about $120. The MO drives cost about $250 at the time, but you could quickly make that up if you bought very much media at all. At $10 - $15 per disk, two MO disks would save you the difference in the drive costs be preventing the purchase of 9 - 10 ZIP disks.
MO is vastly more reliable than ZIP. The MO drive might die. I've never heard of a piece of MO media failing. ZIP had the click of death, and was just generally not a lot more reliable than floppies.
Yet ZIP won the popularity contest and the market.
The lesson: Cost of entry is **everything**. People don't look at cost of ownership.
The MO cartridges were almost identical in size and weight to a ZIP cartridge and they cost about the same amount, but they held more than 5 times as much data. If you were using the MO for data storage, the media was cheaper by a factor of 5 - 6. If you just needed disks to exchange with clients and your files didn't get over ~100MB, then the large capacity was less useful
ZIP drives eventually settled into a price of about $120. The MO drives cost about $250 at the time, but you could quickly make that up if you bought very much media at all. At $10 - $15 per disk, two MO disks would save you the difference in the drive costs be preventing the purchase of 9 - 10 ZIP disks.
MO is vastly more reliable than ZIP. The MO drive might die. I've never heard of a piece of MO media failing. ZIP had the click of death, and was just generally not a lot more reliable than floppies.
Yet ZIP won the popularity contest and the market.
The lesson: Cost of entry is **everything**. People don't look at cost of ownership.
olePigeon
Well-known member
MO disks are more closely resemble the size of a floppy disk rather than a Zip disk. Zip is quite a bit larger. You can actually fit an MO drive behind the floppy bezel and it'll work. I did just that on my LC.
You're right, though. It had a much more expensive upfront cost even though it was lower-cost overall per MB and more reliable. Zip won the marketing war.
Same with the Imation Super Drive. Everyone was looking for a replacement to the floppy, and you'd think the Imation Super Drive would've been perfect. Not only did it have disks the same capacity as Zip, it also doubled as a regular floppy drive (and could even increase the capacity of regular floppy disks to 40 MBs.) But again, Iomega had all the marketing and presence.
You're right, though. It had a much more expensive upfront cost even though it was lower-cost overall per MB and more reliable. Zip won the marketing war.
Same with the Imation Super Drive. Everyone was looking for a replacement to the floppy, and you'd think the Imation Super Drive would've been perfect. Not only did it have disks the same capacity as Zip, it also doubled as a regular floppy drive (and could even increase the capacity of regular floppy disks to 40 MBs.) But again, Iomega had all the marketing and presence.
Trash80toHP_Mini
NIGHT STALKER
MO never had a chance, SyQuest had the Macintosh DTP world all sewn up and everyone HATED that company due to user hostility. Iomega plugged along in far second with their Bernoulli Drives and then bought Floptical Technology. The Zip was product of the year, hitting the sweet spot across platforms over Parallel and SCSI ports. As the young Gates floored the young SJ in POSV, having the better stuff doesn't really matter.
MO never took off, SyQuest withered and died, the Zip ruled the day, the Mac never achieved general acceptance and Microsoft never had a need to strive for excellence. Ubiquity has a quality all its own.
MO never took off, SyQuest withered and died, the Zip ruled the day, the Mac never achieved general acceptance and Microsoft never had a need to strive for excellence. Ubiquity has a quality all its own.
MO is a fun format. I've been meaning to get into it, it's not minidisc exactly, but it is conceptually kind of like minidisc. It's just a regular removable cartridge, and it happens to use "magneto-optical" recording. You can use them for basically anything and other than potentially drivers, there's no special software you need to use to access or write to them, unlike tapes where you'd need to use something like tar, cpio, or a purpose-designed archival or backup tool.
It's much better in every way than zip, save perhaps for overall availability in the US specifically (where, commercially, Zip "won" because it was cheap and good enough). If you don't need to acquire a very large number of cartridges, then that cost issue shouldn't matter too much, but it depends on how you want to have things set up, etc.
Superdisks found their niche among iMac owners. If you didn't already have a bunch of Zip media, and you just got an iMac, there's a good chance you bought a superdisk/LS-120 disk drive because it cost as much as USB floppy drives did in the beginning, and had the advantage of also working with the LS-120 media.
I'd have to go look around, but my understanding LS-120 media cost around what Zip media did at the time, so it would have been a viable alternative depending on your particular needs.
LS-120 had success in that particular niche. There were a few PC OEMs that shipped them pre-installed, but fewer than were already shipping Zip 100 - in part because Zip 100 predates LS-120 by like three years. (1994 vs 1997)
MO was extremely popular in specific markets (medical and archival types of roles, in particular) as well as in, say, Japan.
Just because something wasn't the most popular product, either worldwide or in a specific market, doesn't mean it was a complete flop.
Techmoan has a really good video that mentions this kind of issue, but with Minidisc in the US vs. England. (I think it is this one.) What's said in that video also applies to a lot of different technologies.
It's much better in every way than zip, save perhaps for overall availability in the US specifically (where, commercially, Zip "won" because it was cheap and good enough). If you don't need to acquire a very large number of cartridges, then that cost issue shouldn't matter too much, but it depends on how you want to have things set up, etc.
Superdisks found their niche among iMac owners. If you didn't already have a bunch of Zip media, and you just got an iMac, there's a good chance you bought a superdisk/LS-120 disk drive because it cost as much as USB floppy drives did in the beginning, and had the advantage of also working with the LS-120 media.
I'd have to go look around, but my understanding LS-120 media cost around what Zip media did at the time, so it would have been a viable alternative depending on your particular needs.
LS-120 had success in that particular niche. There were a few PC OEMs that shipped them pre-installed, but fewer than were already shipping Zip 100 - in part because Zip 100 predates LS-120 by like three years. (1994 vs 1997)
MO was extremely popular in specific markets (medical and archival types of roles, in particular) as well as in, say, Japan.
Just because something wasn't the most popular product, either worldwide or in a specific market, doesn't mean it was a complete flop.
Techmoan has a really good video that mentions this kind of issue, but with Minidisc in the US vs. England. (I think it is this one.) What's said in that video also applies to a lot of different technologies.
This "increasing the capacity of normal floppy disks" feature (which fit 32MB, not 40MB) was only a feature of the rare-as-hen's-teeth LS-240 successor of the LS-120. (And the process was more akin to burning a CD than writing a floppy; once written in this mode you couldn't change the data without wiping the disk completely and re-writing it.) It's a shame it never caught on (or that the original version didn't include it); 32MB would have still been a decently useful "sneakernet" format in 2000 (USB flash drives debuted that year at 8MB) and regular floppies were dirt cheap.
I still have a slimline IDE LS-120 in my junk box, taken from an HP laptop. (Now I'm wondering if it's actually an LS-240. Hrmmm....) I've been holding onto it thinking someday it would be fun to incorporate it into some sort of case hack. The cabling needed for that might be a significant issue, though.
MMh. I do have an LS-240 drive as well, which makes sense.
I haven't reviewed the documentation *that* closely, in part because I think I need some cleaning media, but on my disk it made it look like the 32-meg formatted floppy diskette would be readable and writeable justa s a normal drive.
I haven't reviewed the documentation *that* closely, in part because I think I need some cleaning media, but on my disk it made it look like the 32-meg formatted floppy diskette would be readable and writeable justa s a normal drive.
I had an internal LS-120 in the dual Celeron machine I built in early 2000 instead of a floppy drive because when I was fitting it out the LS-120 was only like $10 more. (I think they were dumping stock.) I don't think I ever bought more than one or two boxes of media for it, mostly just used it as a plain old floppy drive. But the motorized eject was a nice parlor trick.
Trash80toHP_Mini
NIGHT STALKER
Never implied it was a failure, just said it never had a chance. A product can have deep penetration in certain market segments but that doesn't make it a hit, like Mac OS and hardware in those days.
LS-120/SuperDisk showed a lot of promise, but reliability with Floppies was too spotty to live up to it and its ATA interface in no way compared to the flexibility of Zip on SCSI and Parallel. By the time USB rolled around CD/R/R/W had all but taken over. Had CD taken a bit longer achieve ubiquity, applications would have been distributed on the de facto standard Zip disk in every computer. Everything else, however better technically was an also ran.
Ubiquity, once established, is near impossible to overcome. That and predatory licensing/marketing practices would be why we still have Windows. Quality doesn't count for much against such landslide wins for Iomega or MS
Again, never said in any way that it was a flop, just one of several very capable also-rans left in the dust by the Zip Drive.
edit: the Zip was so well entrenched even SJ's Apple put bays designed specifically for them in every Pro system until the MDD went full on optical for the second bay. At that point Iomega finally had to roll their own Zip750 MDD mid-section, Apple had made the bezels and upgrade kits for Zips all but stock items up until then.
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Unknown_K
Well-known member
Don't ever try to clean a LS-120 drive with a floppy head cleaner disk, it rips the head off. LS-120 disks look like floppy disks with a different slide door.
The 230MB 3.5" MO disks are single sided , all the 5.25" MO drives I have are double sided.
MO disks use a magnet and heat, so they don't seem to go bad with age.
The 230MB 3.5" MO disks are single sided , all the 5.25" MO drives I have are double sided.
MO disks use a magnet and heat, so they don't seem to go bad with age.
