MO/Floptical Help

[LCARS]

I remember buying MO disks in 1994 (3rd grade) for my Performa, only to be disappointing when I learned that I needed a special drive. Does anyone know what MO/floptical drives work with System 7? Does it mount like a floppy?

I can't remember the difference (if there is one) between magneto-optical and floptical, but it is a format that intrigues me. I use System 7 for all my writing, so I use floppies and Zips for backup. How reliable is MO?

 

[Anonymous Freak]

I remember buying MO disks in 1994 (3rd grade) for my Performa, only to be disappointing when I learned that I needed a special drive. Does anyone know what MO/floptical drives work with System 7? Does it mount like a floppy?
I can't remember the difference (if there is one) between magneto-optical and floptical, but it is a format that intrigues me. I use System 7 for all my writing, so I use floppies and Zips for backup. How reliable is MO?

"Floptical" generally was a term to refer specifically to 3.5" floppy-sized MO disks/drives. "MO", or "Magneto-Optical" is a generic term for any type of disk that is read optically (like a CD-ROM, with a laser,) and is written to by heating the section with the laser, but then actually changing the bit with a magnet. (Much older technology than CD-RW, which uses solely a laser to write.)

I have some old 230 MB MO drives/disks, that have been *VERY* reliable. (Mine are thicker than a normal floppy, so I don't call them 'floptical', which to me, means ones that are physically compatible with 3.5" disks.) I used one as my only drive of any kind on my IIfx for a few years. (The floppy drive was dead; my special black terminator was broken, so the HD wouldn't work; but this external drive did.)

 

[Osgeld]

the MO carts we used to use were darn near a quarter inch thick and looked similar to a cd inside a caddy

I cannot comment on mac, but with windows nt we needed special software to deal with writing them (much like a cd burner app) but reading them they showed up as normal storage, not as a floppy but as a removable hard drive

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Oh, yeah; forgot to answer that part...

If you boot the system with a disk already in the drive, it will be recognized as a hard drive.

 

[LCARS]

Thank you all for the information. Now that I've been educated, I'm in the process of tracking a Mac-compatible one down. This older technology I find, in many ways, more fun and interesting to use than a USB flash drive or the like. Can they be used like a floppy in the sense that I could: pop the MO disk in and save changes to an existing document on the fly? or would I have to have the first erase the disk and then rewrite the file like with CD-RW?

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Thank you all for the information. Now that I've been educated, I'm in the process of tracking a Mac-compatible one down. This older technology I find, in many ways, more fun and interesting to use than a USB flash drive or the like. Can they be used like a floppy in the sense that I could: pop the MO disk in and save changes to an existing document on the fly? or would I have to have the first erase the disk and then rewrite the file like with CD-RW?

The ones I have are random-access-rewritable. I can't speak for all of them, though.