Re: Off topic: CD-R

[Bill Troop billtroop@xxxxxxxx]

> I'm going to need some kind of high-capacity removable media drive for my
> new system
My advice is to use MO (magneto-optical) -- in my view the only reliable
storage technology available today and certainly the only one used by
industries (medicine, record companies) or governments where reliable data
storage is crucial. The Fujitsu DynaMO is not that expensive -- though much
more expensive than CD. MO is very widely used in Japan, widely used in
Europe, and little used in the US, where most people really do not
ultimately care about their data. A review I wrote about this unit
explaining in detail why MO is so desirable and CD/DVD is not, appeared in
the Winter MacDirectory, and should be available on their site
(www.macdirectory.com) within the next few days.
Max current capacity for the small 3.5" units is now 2.3GB. The larger and
much more expensive 5.25" units have much larger capacities (Sony, HP --
these are not really consumer products but used by data centers). Windows
support is excellent, as is support from some backup companies that really
believe in MO, such as that company that makes Partition Magic and a really
good backup program -- eludes me for the second. Mac support is adequate.
Interfaces include IDE, SCSI, USB 2 and on some models Firewire.
Fujitsu has some very interesting new product up their sleeves but I won't
be able to find out anything more until July. Maybe more capacity? Speed? A
price drop? A combined Firewire/USB interface? I have no idea. But they
seem awfully smug so it might be worth waiting for.
There was a bad generation of 3.5" MO drives about four years ago (when the
first 640 MBs came out) but were all great before, and all have been great
since.
ALL MO drives (except the lousy 640 MB generation) are completely
backward-compatible with ALL previous data formats, from the very first
128MB cartridges. Backwards compatibility is a cornerstone of the MO
philosophy.
MO can be a little slow, but not nearly as slow as writing CD-R/CDRW to a
UDF-based format like DirectCD. DirectCD should be avoided at any price. It
remains to be seen whether the new Mt Ranier format will be useful.
But all optical technologies are unreliable compared to MO.