11 Feb
2003
11 Feb
'03
5:27 a.m.
I'm curious, Eric. I have a Sony MD-Data disk drive, and actually
considered using them for certain applications. It uses a SCSI
interface. I can't remember Sony ever predicting them to replace the
floppy. Do you happen to have any references that you can direct me to
that states that?
I never heard of a version of that drive that used IDE or floppy type
interfaces. Were there?
Thanks.
Eric Smith wrote:
--
Dave Mabry dmabry(a)mich.com
Dossin Museum Underwater Research Team
NACD #2093
similiar
question goes for mini-discs, were there any efforts anytime to
use 140mb (?) minidisc as an external storage?
Sony sold "MD-Data" drives. Sony claimed that it would replace
floppy discs. (Amazing how many things were predicted to do that yet
didn't.) The drives were very pricey, which of course prevented
widespread adoption. I can only imagine that some brilliant person
in Sony's marketing department must have been thinking "we can push
these as a floppy drive replacement, sell them to OEMs to be put in
every PC, and make $150 on each unit".
Anyhow, you were probably asking about trying to record data on an
audio MD recorder, perhaps by using the optical digital input. Although
it's sort of possible, the problem is the lossy audio compression. You'd
have to come up with a way to encode the data such that it has audio
characteristics that will pass through the encoder. Of course, the
exact operation of the coder (ATRAC?) is a trade secret of Sony, so
this will be difficult. By the time all's said and done, I doubt that
you could get more than about 20 MB on the disc in this manner, and it
would take over an hour to record that.
.