--- On Fri, 9/25/09, Britt Dodd <[email protected]> wrote:
<clip>
> I've used both 100MB and 250MB drives in the
> past, and have had very few issues. I routinely check the
> media of the disk (especially the edge of the media) so the
> head doesnt catch the edge of the media and cause damage to
> the drive head.
>
> That being said, there was a drive called the
> Avatar Shark which i *love*. These were actually 250MB disks
> with hard platters on them (like hard drives) and these were
> really good. Problem is they folded before a Mac and SCSI
> version of the drive was created.
Once USB thumb drives became available in sizes of 512 meg and up and their
prices dropped drastically, it was the end for most rotating disk removable
storage other than recordable/rewriteable CD/DVD.
Now you can get a 4 gig USB drive for less than what 5 Zip 100 disks cost.
Earlier this summer, I saw an old IBM tape storage system at an auction. It had
eight drives, total online capacity wasn't quite 2 gigabytes. The combined size
was about as tall and deep as a front load clothes washer on a drawer base and
around six times that wide. The power supply and control cabinet was the size
of a washer and dryer set. Original cost for that rig was around $250,000
Today 2 gig USB drives routinely sell for under $10.
Another big one I spotted at a scrapyard, it had two cabinets, each about the
size of three 22 cubic foot upright freezers. About half of each was taken up
by power supplies, cooling fans and ductwork. Inside the building was a pile of
hard drives pulled from it, each 9.1 gig with a proprietary interface. (They
weren't SCA80 or any other standard connector.) I counted slots in the rack,
multiplied by 9.1 and came up with around one terabyte.
Today there are single drives of that capacity, a little smaller than one of
those 9.1 gig drives, commonly on sale for under $100.
I still have a 320 meg and a 640 meg Magneto Optical drive and several 128, 320
and 640 meg MO disks. My 128 meg MO drive died. I used them on real and
emulated Macintosh systems. MO is a nice system, fast enough to play video
from, but just like all the other spinners, outpaced by solid state USB storage.
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