pratap singh wrote:
> Dear Walter Knapp,
>
> Thank you very much again. I further request you some information
> on optical disks. How do you write them? Are they the same as
> DVD.
They are a more durable disk than writeable CD or DVD. Will last far
longer, handle a lot more rewrites. They are similar to MD but even more
durable.
You write to them and format them much as you would a hard disk, full
random file access, not the limited access of CD or DVD. They are
rewriteable up to a million times. On the mac they turn up on the
desktop in the same manner as a hard disk or floppy. They are, of
course, slower than hard disks, though I've used them as emergency boot
disks. Usually the formatting software used can also format hard disks.
The ones I use are 3 1/2" diameter, have a protective shell with
shutter, similar to what's on a floppy. They are, in fact, about the
size of two floppies stacked. There are several capacities, up to 1.3gig
for macs or 2.3gig for windows. (the latest one does not have a mac
driver available yet). All drives read and write all previous sizes to
them. The other sizes are 640meg, 540meg, 230meg, and 128meg.
I have numerous SCSI drives, and one firewire drive. The firewire one
will work with the macs with firewire, and also works with my Sony PC
via a plug in PC card to provide the firewire port.
Fujitsu pretty much has the US market:
http://www.fcpa.com/products/mo-drives/
They have a bunch of info there.
I mostly get blank disks off ebay. I primarily use the 640's or 230's.
We have a couple 1.3gig drives, don't have any 2.3gig ones.
In Japan these are what folks use instead of zip drives. In the US zip
drives nearly drove them out of the market, and did kill most other
removable formats. A zip drive is hardly archival, these are.
Walt
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