Using Magneto Optical drives on vintage 68k Macs

JAG said:
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?
Click to expand...
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jmacz said:
Those look really nice!!
Click to expand...
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).

 
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.
 
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.
 
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Interesting. I can usually swap around drivers and still read the disks. I'm currently trying to track down a memory leak.
 
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.
 
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.
 
How many MO drives is enough? :)

My original MCR3230SS finally died. This is the one that couldn't read 2.3GB disks although seemed to work fine with 640MB and 230MB disks. It stopped reading 230MB disks a few days ago and yesterday it stopped reading 640MB disks. My guess is something regulating the motor speed but the components on these drives are so tiny that I'm going to shelve trying to debug it for some future time when I'm bored. The electrolytic caps on it were already replaced a while back and there's no physical damage anywhere (it's pristine) so it's going to take more effort to debug it so it's going on the back burner.

So I currently have:
  • MCR3230SS (2.3GB) - working
  • MCR3230SS (2.3GB) - dead (the one mentioned above)
  • MCP3064SS (640MB) - working
  • MCF3064SS (640MB) - dead (this was dead on arrival and seller refunded me, spent hours on it but something's wrong with the pressure plate and after hours spent tuning the screws, I tossed in the towel)
I'm going to pull the 640MB working drive out of my SE/30 and convert it into an external drive so I can use it with all my machines. Or maybe I need to get another one... it's just been a hit and miss getting them on eBay (50% success rate).
 
There are a few sellers with 640 MB Fujitsu MCC3064SS drives around $60, mostly selling out of China. I picked one up a while back to replace a dead one, and while it took forever to get here it worked great. YMMV of course, but I was happy with how it turned out for me.
 
I have a whole bunch of MO disks are just getting back into what a now vintage macs. I originally on mac I was hoping I would be able to install straight MO and boot them. I had forgotten how fincky old macs were. Prior to reading this thread my iomation mac formatted disk woun't mount even until I installed the MO extension. The disks I formatted using FWB HDT 4.0 just showed up at disk and hit errors pretty quick when I tried to install MAC OS to it. I have a whole bunch of MO drives, at the moment I am trying to get of my 1.3 gigamo fujitsu internal scsi drives to work on the stock 7600 fast scsi interface. I has a lot switch options. It has a MAC mode jumper, I am not sure though what it actually does as the drive seems to function? Default DIP switch setting is also to report as fixed disk vs MO, are there tradeoffs running in fixed vs MO mode? most of my MO drive are external SCSI, FW and USB. I have 640 internal SCSI and a 2 640mb IDE/ATAPI MO drives. At some point I would like to find a MO drive for my wallstreet powerbook. One popped up a yahoo(j) awhile back but I got last minute snipped on it.
 
I recently got some more MO drives from Japan, as padding for a single unrelated item I bought on YAJ through a proxy. Somewhat rough external units for a couple of bucks each (with an internal drive inside), so figured I might as well. One of them has the MCE3064SS drive, and I'm running into the same issue described over on the other place, namely that a plastic catch has broken, which leaves the drive unable to stay in the ejected position.

Unfortunately, unlike the user in that thread, I don't have the other half of my catch, so I can't fix what I have. Just asking, does anyone here have one of these drives with a still intact catch, and perhaps the ability and desire to 3D model it? It'll likely break in currently working drives too, so it'd be good to have a 3D model ready for printing in nylon or a similar material, similarly to the 3D printable Macintosh floppy drive gears.
 
Correction, I have an MCF, MCP, and a MCC, both 640MB drives. I also have an MCR which is a 2.3GB drive. I just checked my MCF and MCR, and both have the same catch. Dimensions look identical.

Screenshot 2025-03-13 at 11.09.43 AM.png

Will try a test print to see how close I got and let you know.
 
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Awesome, you got on that fast! :D
Gives me hope my MCE will live again, as it otherwise seems to work alright as long as I play the role of the catch :P
 
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