[Techtalk] firewire

[Alvin Goats]

> The thing that does strike me is that the front panel and case design is
> similar to what I do remember, which is most likely to be a much earlier
> version of this, if it is this type of drive.

Syquest, Maxtor and a couple of Japanese manufacturers made a small,
hardshell encased, hard sectored CDRW drive that used a 240Meg
magneto-optical ('minidisk') disk. Get past all the BS of the sales and
advertising people, the CDRW is a magneto optical drive. There is a
strong magnetic field generated that does not have an effect on the disk
unless the disk is "super heated" by the laser. Same thing, just a
different name. This is also how they 'erase' the disk, just set the
magnetic field to one orientation and continuously burn the disk.

The 'hard sectoring" of the disk was somewhat obvious by the radial
spoke pattern of the recording surface. Some of these disks were double
sided, which allowed you to flip the disk over and put more data on it.
I don't know of any that burned both sides without flipping the disk
over. 


Speed on the drives ranged from 1x to 4x CD speeds to write, faster to
read, about the same as a low to mid performance MFM hard drive. Drives
were a bit more moderate in price, the hardshell CDRW disks were quite
expensive. Sunlight exposure of the disks is the same as for a CDRW
disk.

These were totally incompatable with floppy drives, many were SCSI with
some parallel port external versions using the SCSI drive. I've heard of
some that were IDE, but I haven't seen any myself.

Sound more like what you were thinking of?

Alvin