Now I will get very grumpy, and it probably will still do no good. No
one is listening!
Marty Michener wrote:
> In the original product descriptions, around 1990, Sony actually described
> a soon-to-be-released DATA drive for the MD, where drives would soon be
> available for all computers that would give us the honest data storage of
> the disk's actual capacity (around 250 megs?).
>
> Vaporware! I suspect what went wrong was either 1. the transfer rates were
> only about 100k per second, as we see in real audio recorders, or 2 they
> figured that people might copy audio DATA from disk to disk, or 3 they just
> couldn't imagine invading the ZIP disk market, or some combination of the
> three.
They produced the drives, attempted to sell them, in fact did sell a
fair number, were killed by Zip, and gave up about 5 years ago. I
considered that drive when I ended up with 3.5" optical disks, but it
was on shaky ground already then, and 3.5's had announced the next size
up. You can occasionally find a drive auctioned on Ebay. And the same
disk is still available, where it's used to record multitrack audio in a
different drive. They did not produce a version that used the 640 meg
version of the MD disk.
Note that the data drive they produced used a disk with a slightly
different case, the drives would read and play audio, but could not
write to the audio disks as they sensed the wrong type of disk. Maybe
that was appropriate to your zinger about sony owning a lot of music,
but they did produce the drives. Just everybody bought "click of death"
drives instead. (Well, not everybody, Japan went to 3.5" opticals, same
as I did) As I've noted repeatedly people in the US are exceedingly
stupid, always buying the cheapest, even when it was known that you
would get less than a year from the zip drive itself. Even Apple
Computer choose to put in zips over optical drives of larger capacity.
Also note that MD can write much faster than you think. They are about
as fast as my earlier 3.5" opticals were, and those are many times
faster than a CD drive at realtime. Earliest opticals were about the
same as 8X CD.
In fact, if you wish to take a trip up to MIR, you will find some Sony
MD data drives in place, where they worked fine for the entire life of
MIR. Anyway, I think MIR is still up, have not been paying attention.
> Internal ZIP drives, which took forever to reach the add-on market, copy
> data around 400k per second. Of course this is plenty fast to record 44.1k
> 16 stereo, full bore, but I wonder about the power requirements, as
> compared to the laser tech of CDROM and laser-plus magnetic of MD?
Zip drives are magnetic media, very unreliable and tiny now. Little more
than a glorified floppy disk. In the same size format (3.5") you can
have a drive that holds 2.3gigs, and can read/write at 8 megs/sec. It
formats with standard software, the same stuff that formats hard drives.
That will handle your audio just fine many times over. Note this is the
just announced (on 1/8/2002) new larger size drive. The biggest optical
drives I have are the 1.3gig. Like all such drives, even the 2.3gig
drive will read/write 128meg, 230meg, 540meg, 640meg, & 1.3 gig. Each
generation can handle all that came before. And, these disks are like
putting it up forever, the most durable computer disks available,
period! If you want your data to be fully accessable in a normal disk
format that's fully read/write in a protected, removable disk, you can't
do better.
So, why are these ignored? Nothing proves my contention that people are
exceedingly stupid and will only buy the cheapest quite as well as that.
The Japanese are not stupid, these are pretty common over there.
> Remember that Sony is one of the largest OWNERS of copyrighted material in
> the world. Their other divisions must take marching orders from that huge
> corporate financial resource. Look at who owns the copyrights now to
> movies, songs, plays etc. This is bound to make everything else take a
> low-risk route to the future, as seen by the BillGates types within Sony.
The fact they got so severly burned by zip will certainly make Sony more
cautious. They learned the lesson the hard way that quality counts for
nothing. Zip killed data MD, has left optical disks barely holding on. I
use older powerbooks as they are the last version to have a optical
drive available, even if it is just a 230meg. Now the more vulnerable,
smaller size but larger disk and slower CD-RW's are taking over that niche.
Sony's music section probably counts for far less of their profits than
their hardware. And certainly has less influence on things than folks
believe. Every time someone does not like things that Sony does they
blame it on their music section when there are perfectly obvious reasons
that take less imagination. All of Sony has to turn a profit, not just
the music section.
Walt
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