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Hi-MD User Manuals, Storage Drive + NH600 Knockoff

Christopher

By Christopher,
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highlandsun Newbie

highlandsun

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I dunnow, the idea of a Data-drive Hi-MD seems really goofy to me.  A DVD-R is much larger, much cheaper, burns much faster, and already works on most computers.  For something convenient, key drives aren't so expensive.  Sony is out to lunch on this one, I'm afraid.

Yeah, I tend to agree. HiMD would have to come up at least one order of magnitude in actual read/write speed to really win. The fact that MD is faster than floppies is pretty much irrelevant today - just about every thing you would have needed floppies for is done with USB flash drives now, and they're only a couple inches in size. Definitely more convenient when you just need to move a few files from one box to another.

The only things MD has going for it are the reasonably compact form factor, random access read/write, and data longevity. The things it has against it are slow speed, insufficient density (compared to other options available today) and idiotic proprietary data formats. But really, the biggest thing MD has going against it today is that it is a Sony product. Until the balance of power in Sony leadership shifts back to Sony Electronics, away from Sony Music/Entertainment, they might as well forget about being a consumer electronics company. Certainly I've stopped thinking of them as such.

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bobdibest Newbie

bobdibest

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I agree with highlandsun with regards to sony electronics/music/entertainment! but i think everyone except sony see whats wrong!!! Never mind they seem to win when it comes to gaming, until Apple release an ipod gaming system HLOL, anything is possible!

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hobgoblin Newbie

hobgoblin

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the thing is that you cant give away usb sticks highlandsun. with floppys you could and forget about it, same with cd-r's right now. and maybe in the future dvd-r's, but right now there are to many legacy systems that have only a cd-rom unit.

if the data only hi-md unit is cheap, the media even cheaper, and you can get it in boxes of 10 or more allmost anywhere then i think the uptake may well get a boost.

cd-r's have become more or less throw-away. but cd-r's can only be written ones. a hi-md you can rewrite and even delete some files to make up space without doing a complete wipe like on a cd-rw.

the thing is that hi-mds are as flexible as floppys but with a greater storage.

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chuckempire Newbie

chuckempire

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I wouldn't want a Hi-MD drive on my computer. USB 1 is just too slow for a backup solution.

I *do* use Hi-MD to store some data, but I already have a minidisc player that I use every day for listening to music and making microphone recordings, so it's convenient for me to have some files on the discs and only have to take one cable to access them anywhere.

This drive is aimed at a backup/convenient storage market which has simply moved past this kind of technology.

For convenient storage, a 1 GB USB key costs A$150 and where I live, the majority of business people and students use this kind of technology, with far higher transfer rates and ease of use than a disk/drive solution.

For long term backup, DVD+-RW with DL cost A$180 and the media is becoming cheap enough for people to buy stacks of 50 DVDs, Portable hard discs are also inexpensive and easy to use. Compared to these technologies Hi-MD is ridiculously slow and really has too little capacity for any serious backup.

In my opinion, Sony will offer this drive at a price point above USB keys and around the same level as DVD RW and portable hard drives. Given the high price to performance ratio, I can think of few if any people who will go for this technology.

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dclarke32 Newbie

dclarke32

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sony will listen, all it will take is apple releasing an i-pod that records in high quality. you have to believe they are already working on that right now, i would say it would be something with less memory, for maybe 200-250 that records as well as any of our md players, only with a much better software component. sales go down, and they start to pay attention. that will be the only way.

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zerodB Newbie

zerodB

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Perhaps, but don't forget Sony does a lot more than just portable audio. True, MD is doing comparatively well compared to previous years - hey - it was orignally just a niche market... but in the long run the Sony execs might not see continuing to invest resources into MD as a profitable enterprise, especially given that Sony are doing so well in other areas - the PlayStation empire being just one example - but there are many other outside the consumer electronics arm of Sony.

I'll be disappointed if it happens - MD being ditched over a simple cost/benefit analysis. I believe the MD format has a lot of potential, but it MAY indeed happen...

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radioactive Newbie

radioactive

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It really remembers me the MDS NT1 deck I had last year (with an E10, yeepeekayaii!).

zerodb, Sony is now making a lot more money in other branches than videogames (read in French press, profits of Sony Entairtainement are drowning). And they have an image to keep, if they want to give up MDs, it would be a total disaster forits image.

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Fray Adjacent Newbie

Fray Adjacent

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I could echo many things mentioned here... Hopefully Sony IS reading this, and will take heed. WE are the market!

HiMD has great potential. The MD is a great format. True, Sony screwed the pooch when they released it in the first place. The highest capacity recordable media at the time, were FDDs. Recordable CDs were close behind, however, reflecting on my childhood when I first handled a CD and thought "that's stupid!", recordable CDs still had the inherent flaw: Drop it or scratch it, your stuff goes bye bye. MD being smaller, and self contained/protected was a much better form of media. At the time, they may have only held a little more than 100MB, but think about what else came out around that time: The ZIP drive. Some people still use them, even though they are pretty rare (probably for similar reasons to Sony MD)

I would like a HiMD data drive. I want to archive stuff on discs that will not degrade with time, and are reuseable. I also usually leave my HiMD player at work to listen to music. Now I even have a new use. I download TV shows and watch them on my laptop at work in the evenings, as I work 2nd shift. I don't download them directly to my laptop, though. I can copy files to one or two HiMD discs in the morning and put them in my laptop bag, then use the player at work to play the movies on my laptop.

An internal drive would be nicer, tho. I don't like having a ton of USB devices plugged in willy-nilly all over my desk.

Anyway, I hope Sony listens up, and does HiMD right.

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zerodB Newbie

zerodB

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It's interesting... all this talking.

What needs to be brought up is the fact that there do exist MO-media internal PC drives, and, owing to the fact that there are not limited in power consumpution, can write a LOT faster than the Hi-MD transfer rate.

I wonder IF a hypothesised internal Hi-MD drive would suffer the same slow transfer rate as the portables do...?

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jadeclaw Newbie

jadeclaw

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The transfer rate isn't that big problem, the real problem are the extreme long seek times.

Compared to my NH700, my old r37 is roughly 5 times faster.

And a good CD-Rom drive is even twice as fast than that.

If you have a bunch of small files, a five minute copy job could easily be stretched to more than 30 minutes.

I'm wondering, why there are no seek times stated for the DS-HMD1.

Is it as sluggish as the portables?

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Fray Adjacent Newbie

Fray Adjacent

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It's interesting... all this talking.

What needs to be brought up is the fact that there do exist MO-media internal PC drives, and, owing to the fact that there are not limited in power consumpution, can write a LOT faster than the Hi-MD transfer rate.

I wonder IF a hypothesised internal Hi-MD drive would suffer the same slow transfer rate as the portables do...?

That's a good question. I'm sure with internal drives, and power consumption not really being an issue, write and seek times could be reduced. I'd LOVE an internal HiMD drive that performed better than a portable running on a USB port.

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Fray Adjacent Newbie

Fray Adjacent

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I'd like one of the data drives to keep at home, and one of the gen 2 units to take to work... I do have an NH600D right now, but I wonder if Sonic Stage will write MP3s to it for playback in a newer unit? Hmm... if that does work, then my NH600D can be my 'data' drive at home.

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hobgoblin Newbie

hobgoblin

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from what i understood he wanted to use the 600 as a data drive permanently located on his desktop. the unit used for playback would be a new 2nd gen with mp3 ability. but can he do direct mp3 transfer to said 600 even tho its not a 2nd gen unit? or is sonicstage being anal about it?

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Fray Adjacent Newbie

Fray Adjacent

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If SonicStage doesn't find MP3-capability on the recorder, it automatically converts.

You have to connect a 2nd generation unit to transfer in native MP3.

I figured it probably would do that. It would detect the 600D and since it can't play MP3 back, it wouldn't record to it.

I wonder if the data drives will be able to.

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Colin Pye Newbie

Colin Pye

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It's hard to even guess what Sony is going to do, it's so big that neither hand knows what the other is doing. Given what the've done with the Clie in recent history, they don't seem to be too concerned with burning customer loyalty.

For those who don't remember, early on in MiniDisc history, they did have a data-drive, with a SCSI connector, and specially-formatted MD-Data discs. They even had drivers for both PC and Mac, and a program that could play music through the drive, just like the early CD drives. It looked like a good thing, and given the low power requirements, it seemed like it would be right at home in a laptop. At the time, 140MB was a lot of storage, bigger than a lot of hard drives. 100 floppies worth of storage in a smaller, more durable format? It seems like a no-brainer.

I knew it would never happen, though, when I saw Sony-branded Zip Disks. 1/3 less storage, 4 times the cost, bigger, bulkier, more delicate... I almost forgot about the click-of-death. Had MD-Data took off (other than in some small medical niches), they couldn't have made enough money on Zip disks to pay royalties to IOMega. Or maybe there was some sort of non-compete clause in the contract. Whatever the reason, MD-Data drives didn't get the production volumes to come down to a consumer-friendly price point, and got less press than Digital-8, the Sony 8MM Digital Audio format that could put 24 hours of audio on a single tape.

Enough about DAT-killers, though. These days, we have the newly released PSP. The PlayStation Portable has the amazing new UMD disk, which sounds (and looks) an awful lot like a High-MD disc with the corners cut off. 1.4 GB of storage instead of 1GB... is that really enough justification for yet another media format? I don't know, but then, I'm not getting Sony's money for my thoughts.

About the only thing I can see that UMD has going for it (from the point of view of a content-provider) is that there are not many things out there at this time that can write a UMD disk. And that means that there's not much out there that can write or copy PSP content, be it movies, games, or music. Perhaps that means we can all look forward to buying another copy of The White Album or Thriller, yet again.

Greater minds than mine must be able to come up for a reason for avoiding their own technology, especially when there's a very easy to way to handle copy-detection. If prerecorded material were done using MD's CD-like stamped out disc mode, then an easy way to see if it were real would be to try and write to the disc. If you could, then it's not an original, and you could wipe out the copy at the same time! Perhaps that would be too easy.

I can hope that I'm wrong, and that new and exciting MD-Data applications will be on the way, but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting...

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