🚀 go-pugleaf

ee91mds2@brunel.ac.uk (Mark D Smith) writes:

>I am looking to buy a removable mass storage system to replace my ever
>growing collection of floppies and to backup my two 40MByte hard disks. I
>have been looking at various options, including flopticals and syquest
>drives and, at the moment, a 44MByte syquest drive looks to be the best
>solution.

The nice thing about flopticals is that they handle all the useful 3.5"
magnetic floppies too. The only thing that gets in the way of replacing the
standard floppy drive with a floptical is that some software is locked
by accessing the floppy drive directly. Of course, an internal SCSI
interface is also necessary. I am wondering if a module that redefines
SWI ADFS_DiscOP would be enough to solve the software lock problem.
Floptical drive mechanisms are available for $275 and the 21MB disks cost
reasonable so it looks like a viable option.

For more $$$ rewritable optical drives look interesting. Once the drive is
paid for, the media costs $25 per 128 MB (3.5") or somewhat more but cheaper
per MB for 650 MB media. The data on optical disks decays slower than on
magnetic disks, so is good for relatively long-term storage.

When the market catches up with the technology (I mean when we can look back
on the technology that is available today), the best data storage is 3D
optical RAM. After all, we are still in the dark ages.

--
Adam David. (adamd²@rhi.hi.is)