Hi,

I'm having a really hard time finding someone with one of these drives that can let me know how fast or slow they are.

I know they were common on NeXT boxes, but I've also heard that the Amigas had them. (I'm not even remotely knowledgable about the Amiga series.)

Does someone have one of these with working media that can benchmark it for me? I'm simply curious -- I've heard that MO drives verify every write, so they're slow at writing. But I've never seen in quantified in figures.

@742311

While no Amiga came with a MO drive by default, there were those in the community that used them. Since most of the drives were standard SCSI mechanisms, they could be used as any other removable drive. I used to use a 3.5" 640mb drive for backups and prototyping volumes that I'd burn to CDs (back when a burn took you a full 60+ minutes), and they were very useful in that regard.

Speed wise, they did have the disadvantage of slower writes, but the drives had big buffers compared to other drives of the time, so small, non-sequential writes were pretty close to other removable drives around at the same time. Longer, sequential writes, on the other hand, would show up the fact that the drive had to do more work. Even then, they weren't unduly sluggish.

On the plus side though, you could leave the disks lying on top of your TV or speakers without any worry of the magnetic field damaging the disk.

_________________
"Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Study hard, be evil."

@evilFrog

Oh okay, "those in the community that *used* them", meaning nobody has them anymore

I thought they would be somewhat more prevalent than they turn out to be. I would test it myself, getting access to a SCSI machine isn't a problem. But the drives are priced at insane levels which spook me. Media isn't too bad though.

Even if I bought it, I'd have to turn around and sell it, most likely at a loss, because ... I'm just interested in getting some speed rate figures. Kind of like a online speed test.

I don't know why they didn't catch on very well. Maybe it's because Iomega had better marketing...or cheaper items. I think we all know how well CDs stand to abuse, especially DVDs. There's practically no reliable inexpensive backup media these days -- heck, 9.1 GB MO disks sound ideal for me, that's almost the same size as a dual-layer DVD. And DVDs don't last, at least burned ones don't.

@742311

Yeah, for whatever reason the Zip drive managed to get the market penetration that SyQuest and many others had failed to get before. Probably because Iomega made the thing to the right price point. I remember our university having one in each PC, and availability like that drives further adoption. Everyone wanted to be the inventor of the next floppy disk. Then CDR got cheap and easy, and nothing could compete with it until USB pen drives got big enough.

The 5.25" mechanisms for MO were always crazy expensive, they went mainly to healthcare and photography industries. FYI, you have to 'flip' the disk - it has 50% of the stated capacity per side. 3.5" mechanisms are much cheaper to get, and have the full capacity without flipping the disk, but only went as far as 2.3GB. Anything over a 640M mechanism is harder to find and support on that front too - you won't find the media.

So, all in all, somewhat of a shame that MO didn't do better, as it was a really cool format, but then cheaper has almost always won in the marketplace.

Best thing these days for your average user to use for backups is, sadly, another hard disk of greater or equal size.

_________________
"Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Study hard, be evil."

@evilFrog

Yes, I think everybody had a Zip drive back in the late 90's. To be honest, they did well -- the storage was sufficient for the job, they were fast enough for the times, priced reasonably, available everywhere, and were reasonably reliable.

In my searches, I found this review: http://www.tomshardware.com/print/magneto,reviews-791.html

It describes a nice little USB 2.0 1.3GB MO drive. I'd probably buy one. Disks -- yeah, those are on eBay, so at least it's not that bad. But while eBay has that and the drives, the drives are shockingly expensive. I dug up some old review from 2005, it said the unit was priced at 110 British pounds. (I don't know how to do fancy symbols on a PC yet. The Mac, which I've been an active user for 15 years, always made it easy.) Anyways nowadays the price on eBay is FOUR times higher, and NOBODY is buying them!

Maybe they all migrated to the dumpster. Heck, at 500KiB/sec write, I can kind of agree, that's USB 1.1 write speeds. Still, a good solid write on stable media for archival purposes is a good stable write, and you can't really argue about that much compared to the issues that tape, DVD, banks of HDDs and other formats face.

The major problem with data archiving today is that we still don't have good methods today any more than 10 years ago. Except the amount of data has increased vastly, and will continue to do so exponentially.

That's why I say, the less you have, the less you have to worry about. If all the data you care about is less than 10GB *total*, that makes it a whole lot better than if you're flirting with terabytes of photos, movies, data from 1992, and so on. Apparently the problem hasn't been solved yet even in the professional sector (with HDDs failing, tapes going out after 5 years, ...) so who knows when this will manifest into a severe problem. Back in the early 90's everything you had could fit in under 1GiB even if you were a hoarder, if you weren't than 100MiB was usually enough to cover everything, and that's including OS backups and floppy disk images.

Last edited by 742311 on 30-Aug-2014 at 07:42 PM.