26 Feb
2001
26 Feb
'01
11:49 a.m.
Mark wrote:
A question about MO disks and the Canon MO drive
installed in some NeXT cube
computers.
I know NeXT MO disks are single-sided, commonly quoted as having a capacity of
256MB.
Jerome Fine replies:
I have some rather old MO disks as well, but they are made by Sony and are for
a 5 1/4" Magneto Optical Disk drive - an S501. They are very close to 290 MBytes
on each side and are formatted for 512 bytes per sector.
I don't know anything about the NeXT hardware, but if the shoe fits, ....
Canon used to make document imaging systems with
built-in 500MB MO drives for
data storage. These used double-sided disks of around 250MB per side. They
also made the Diskfile 5001S, an external SCSI MO drive. The Diskfile 5001S
allowed data from the document imaging systems to be transferred to computer,
and also functioned as a general-purpose storage device.
Since 250 MBytes per side is close, they might be the same as the ones I have.
Mine are 5 1/4" disks and formatted at 512 bytes per sector and hold about
295 MBytes on each side for a total of about 590 Mbytes per disk.
In addition, a friend of mine has a large number of these disks which he no longer
wants. For a nominal charge plus shipping and handling, I am sure that they can
be made available. The shipping alone (these weigh about 1/2 lb. EACH) will
likely be more than the disks, so I do think it is a good deal. On eBay, they
often try to get the suckers to pay over $ US 5.00 a disk just to start, although
sometimes they start at a more reasonable $ US 2.00 each. I am in Toronto,
so the shipping may be more than you want to pay!
Does anyone have a requirement. I suspect they will only be available until the
end of February. So please act fast.
Sincerely yours,
Jerome Fine