Hi, On Mon, 19 Apr 1999 Jason wrote: There are optical drives and optical drives... (read on) The other person is wrong. MO disks are rewriteable, and come to think of it some other types of optical media are, including CD-RW, DVD-RAM and PD. As I understand it, flopticals are just like floppies but use a laser to assist in positioning the drive head. I wouldn't call these optical disks. (I bet they're as reliable as Windows too.) There are various types of optical disk, of which magneto-optical ("MO") disks are one. MO disks are rewritable (like 10 million times), and are about the best -- in terms of media reliability and longevity -- true random-access rewriteable removable storage there is. And the media is much cheaper than Zip, Jaz etc. disks. There are 3.5" and 5.25" MO disks. 5.25" disks are also available in write-once varieties, but the drives themselves can handle both. (In fact the write-once disks are physically almost identical to the normal ones. The drive reads a flag to see that the disk should be write-only, and the drive firmware handles preventing writes to sectors that have already been written.) Anyway, I'll elaborate on my previous comment. IBM certainly used to sell SCSI 128MB 3.5" MO drives (circa 1992?). If you are getting a pair of these, using them will be no problem, assuming you have a SCSI controller. Earlier than that, IBM sold at least one other type of optical drive, which was a WORM (write once read many) drive. As the WORM acronym suggests, disks for the 3363 are not rewritable. They hold about 200MB each. The model 3363 drive was introduced in 1987, and I picked one up recently, along with two MCA controllers. The 3363 uses a custom interface. I want to get hold of an ISA controller to use with the 3363. I found someone who has one for sale, sold as seen for US$25. Too much for me. If you are getting a couple of 3363 drives (which are big, heavy beasts), they will be more of a curiosity than anything else. They use proprietary disks, which -- if you can still get them from IBM at all -- probably cost about $90 each. I have four still-sealed ones, but I'm hanging onto them in the hope that I eventually get an ISA controller card for my 3363... Plug: check out my Amiga Magneto-Optical Drive FAQ. This contains some info on why MO drives are cool, and a fair amount of details about using them with Amiga computers and well as non-platform-specific things. The URL is http://home.freeuk.net/markk/Amiga_MO_FAQ/main.html -- Mark