A chance lost for Sony

[Telegramsam]

I have never understood why sony never introduced minidisc drives in pc's or laptops. It seems a lost chance to me which could still save the minidisc. This would be more flexible, being able to write data to a smaller disc than cd which doesn't get damaged so easily and is smaller to store. What do you think?

[greenmachine]

MD data drives could have been an alternative to floppy disk drives when USB flash drives were non-existent or small in capacity and expensive. Nowadays I wouldn't have a use for MD drives. If I need to, I can use my Hi-MD as an external (albeit slow) drive.

[Ishiyoshi]

*topic moved to its appropriate section of the forum.

[Stuge]

No,Not at all .

[DerTapir]

The problem is: Speed , speed, speed..... and again: SPEED.....

Sony tried, as i know, 2 times to place a starage MD drive on the market

1. Sony MD Data MDH-10

2. DS-HMD1

For my opinion, the main problem is based on the factor speed, especial seekspeed.

Ever tried to backup your hompage-data via MD ?

NO ? BUT ME !

I thought my MZ-NH 1 would be ready to explode. After writing a file, the drive drove back to the beginning of

the disc (where the TOC lies ??) and back again, just to write the next file.....

And that for EACH damned file !!! After 3 minutes or so ( I thought , the write head would come out, saying "hello"...), i canceled the procedure and put everything into a ZIP file.

with only one file, the backup up was quit good. and much, much faster !!!

So for daily use, its too slow because of seektime and the writing mechanism.

If the TOC would be written completely before writing each file, then write speed would be increases enormous, but i don't know what would happen with the data integrity than.

Minidisk is a small child of the magneto-optical technique, which is allready the "old bear" of data storage !!

Sony RMO-S561 9.1GB 5¼" MO External

The "big ones" use more intelligent controllers to write the data (SCSI-Controller), the laser systems are more powerful, the spinspeed is higher.

Maybe it would be possible, to "compress" the Data-Storage technique into MD-Sice, but for what price ??? and what kind of data-integrity...??

Here is the the newest Minidisk-like Storage Solution: Fujitsu MCR3230AP 3,5" Build in Drive. (already popular IDE technique)

Not available anymore. Why? I don't know !!??

Maybe because auf the write speed ??

I made a backup of my 50 GB Audio files today to an external DVD burner -> 8 Speed... >10MB/s....

Much faster than MO does on; Mediaprice->peanuts....

For my opinion, the dead of beautiful things such as MD and MO-Drives came with making the CD-R and co. popular.

every notebook needs a CD drive. With a burner instead of only the drive, you are already prepaired to make backups and don't need a second drive (Like MD....) Change the CD burner into an DVD-RAM burner, you will have nearly the same comfort, as writing data to an MO-Drive. (A DVD-RAM has an error correction, as MO drives does, too; it writes around "bad sectors")

PS:

slider wrote:

This would be more flexible, being able to write data to a smaller disc than cd

ever used Mini-CDRs ?? they are cuddly, aren't they ??

[Avrin]

No.

[Sparky191]

I have no need for any small disk these days.

I have a Mp3 player which is a 2GB Flash Stick, which I use very rarely but is handy because it the size of a stick of gum and I almost always have it on me. For bigger stuff I have a 250GB 2.5" USB powered external.

[DerTapir]

@sparkey191

You are right

for example: I use my floppy drive only to preinstall the Raid driver, needed to install windows XP on an raid system.

Avrin wrote:

No.

that's not a basis for discussion.

What do you mean with No ??

Edited November 27, 2007 by DerTapir

[Scrypt]

This is going to sound incredibly childlike, which, of course, it is:

From a selfish POV, I'd like to see MD drives in a few computer models so long as they could be accessed like CD drives and were capable of mounting MD/HiMD discs. Inevitably, people in orange jumpsuits would create software jukeboxes capable of playing the files. If such drives were included in a sufficient number of non-Sony machines, then that (and legendary status among the Grub-Grub Folk) would provide the incentive.

The selfish reason: No need to waste precious battery and hardware life uploading recordings to computer from expensive last-gen legacy HiMD models. Obviously, the same argument would apply to dl from cpu to MD as well.

Highly unlikely, of course. But my inner eight-year-old idealist would like to think otherwise.

[Sparky191]

If 3yrs ago with HiMD or even with a 300MB SP disk Sony had made any effort to market such a drive then I'm sure it would have sold. As it was no one heard of them outside of existing MD users. Also Sony made them very expensive. You can still buy PC/MD drives here and there. But no one wants them.