Using Magneto Optical drives on vintage 68k Macs

[MrFahrenheit]

Ah, I know very little about dye sublimation printers, but your labels look fantastic. Do you get premade floppy labels or cut them to size by hand or with a paper cutting machine?

2.75x2.75 Labels - SL121 | SheetLabels.com®

Get the lowest prices & same day shipping on 2.75" x 2.75" labels - square - rounded corners - any quantity. Product: SL121

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2.688x2 Labels - SL548 | SheetLabels.com®

Get the lowest prices & same day shipping on 2.688" x 2" labels - rectangle - rounded corners - any quantity. Product: SL548

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[MrFahrenheit]

Those look really nice!!

Thank you!

@JAG The advantage of a dye sublimation printer is that it uses solid wax blocks in the printing process. It melts each of the four colors, and applies that hot wax to the paper. This creates a very uniform image, vs printing with inkjet or laser (which tend to be a bit streaky or be dependent upon the quality of the paper and its ability to soak up ink).

Dye sublimation prints onto the surface of the paper, and binds with the paper, giving it that raised feeling, almost like how business cards used to be made (where you could feel the letters with your fingers).

 

[olePigeon]

I got that raised texture when using glossy stock with a regular laser, but probably not to the same degree. See here:

https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/fancy-homebrew-stuffit-expander-floppy-packaging.40774/

Also, the old Tektronix (pre Xerox Phaser) color laser printer paper has a chemical coating on one side that mixes with the ink when you print, giving it a nice glossy look as if printed from a press. It's pretty cool.

 

[jmacz]

Which is the best driver for the Fujitsu MO drives? I have been using the MO driver v2.3.8. I'm thinking of trying the MO Disk Master one that @zefrenchtoon uploaded. Or possibly the Disk Drive Tune Up one that @MrFahrenheit mentioned.

Reason being I'm starting to see some random Finder crashes when copying files to my MO drive. Two lock ups today so far and one was trying to copy all of the 4K+ files on a CodeWarrior 4 Pro Tools ISO to an MO disk. Locked up about half way through with what looks to be some heap corruption. I think @MrFahrenheit had a similar issue back in 2023 which he ended up root causing to be his Mac's logic board. I surely hope this issue isn't with my Quadra 800 logic board

Hoping it's this v2.3.8 MO driver.

 

[jmacz]

Ok, the MO Disk Master didn't work <- didn't work as in it won't read any of my existing MO disks which won't work for me. Trying the Pinnacle one.

EDIT: Pinnacle one won't read my existing disks either. Oh well, back to the fujitsu one I guess.

 

[olePigeon]

Interesting. I can usually swap around drivers and still read the disks. I'm currently trying to track down a memory leak.

 

[jmacz]

Yeah, not sure what's going on. All my disks are formatted using MO Disk Formatter (Fujitsu). They mount/read just fine using the MO v2.3.8 driver but they will not mount/read with the Pinnacle one. The MO Disk Master one keeps asking if I want to initialize the disks.

I just finished copying over an 8K+ directory tree for CW4 Pro and it got through this time but did have one error. One file failed to copy and it said it was due to a drive error. After the rest of the files finished, I found the file in question and copied it over without issue. So something's definitely not perfect with this v2.3.8 driver.

 

[jmacz]

Of course, it could be the drive (hardware) too...

 

[zefrenchtoon]

You can try Hard Disk SpeedTools too. It contains different removable drivers

Also I used Drivor when I was young with my first MO drives

 

[jmacz]

Thanks @zefrenchtoon . I may be jumping the gun... I think I have an issue with my Quadra 800.

 

[MrFahrenheit]

For 3.5" MO disks, I still use the Fujitsu driver software.

For 5.25" MO disks, I've found Disk Drive Tune-Up! 3.14 to work the best (and sometimes the only thing that actually works, depending on the size of the disks/the drive).

I have also used SilverLining 5 and FWB Hard Disk Toolkit 3.