LGR Oddware - Magneto-optical WORM Disc Drive
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Date: 2022-04-14
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Comments and reviews: 10
Felonius
-I remember these, and the Bernoulli Box, as well as the Zip (commented elsewhere. WORMs never found their real niche outside of simple mass backup. The Zip was keeping up with WORM, close enough anyway, and it wasn't a multithousand dollar investment. Once CDs came out though, these guys were history - overnight. The WORM really would have been a hit, had Zip not cut them down during the period of -Zip Drives-, Tape drives, or -other R/W or W1Rx- through to CDRW. Super pricey and the cartridges were slow and expensive: I only saw one in an actual computer in 40 years. -
-Thanks! This was a really good look at 1st and 2nd gen WORM! -
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-I remember these, and the Bernoulli Box, as well as the Zip (commented elsewhere. WORMs never found their real niche outside of simple mass backup. The Zip was keeping up with WORM, close enough anyway, and it wasn't a multithousand dollar investment. Once CDs came out though, these guys were history - overnight. The WORM really would have been a hit, had Zip not cut them down during the period of -Zip Drives-, Tape drives, or -other R/W or W1Rx- through to CDRW. Super pricey and the cartridges were slow and expensive: I only saw one in an actual computer in 40 years. -
-Thanks! This was a really good look at 1st and 2nd gen WORM! -
reply
Ian
I remember the 12- version of those that would go into OSAR jukeboxes that would hold 200+ 30GB disks. Being -write once- is not something that was going against it, it was in fact an extremely important feature. When you're archiving financial documents and such, the SEC has very strict rules which state that any documents that are archived onto digital media must be written to a type that is NOT re-writable and has an endurance of like 70 years. I imagine a lot of fortune 500 companies still have these.
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I remember the 12- version of those that would go into OSAR jukeboxes that would hold 200+ 30GB disks. Being -write once- is not something that was going against it, it was in fact an extremely important feature. When you're archiving financial documents and such, the SEC has very strict rules which state that any documents that are archived onto digital media must be written to a type that is NOT re-writable and has an endurance of like 70 years. I imagine a lot of fortune 500 companies still have these.
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MrZorbatron
This is a Magneto-Optical drive. WORM is a function of the media, not the drive. Some media were rewritable, some weren't. The particular cartridge you are displaying IS rewritable, so it is not a WORM setup with that cartridge. Rewritable media tended to be used where transport of data was important, and WORM media was used heavily for transaction logging in the financial industry.
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This is a Magneto-Optical drive. WORM is a function of the media, not the drive. Some media were rewritable, some weren't. The particular cartridge you are displaying IS rewritable, so it is not a WORM setup with that cartridge. Rewritable media tended to be used where transport of data was important, and WORM media was used heavily for transaction logging in the financial industry.
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Ciel
There were smaller MO drives made, disks 2. 5-3- in diameter (size. I gather they were slow (slower than the Zip, despite SCSI interface. I got one form a friend, huge clunky box (long, almost like a shoe box) with its own mains cable. No idea about the capacity. I couldn-t find a driver for it, so I shipped it & and a stack of disks to the British Computer Museum. :)
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There were smaller MO drives made, disks 2. 5-3- in diameter (size. I gather they were slow (slower than the Zip, despite SCSI interface. I got one form a friend, huge clunky box (long, almost like a shoe box) with its own mains cable. No idea about the capacity. I couldn-t find a driver for it, so I shipped it & and a stack of disks to the British Computer Museum. :)
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Lost
Holy crap, I'm pretty sure my company had one of these when I started working there in the late '90s. Mostly we used ZIP disks for years, but before that I remember briefly using some kind of cartridge-ized CD for backing up data and recently I had been trying to figure out what it could be. I'm pretty sure it was one of these WORM drives now. What a nostalgia trip!
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Holy crap, I'm pretty sure my company had one of these when I started working there in the late '90s. Mostly we used ZIP disks for years, but before that I remember briefly using some kind of cartridge-ized CD for backing up data and recently I had been trying to figure out what it could be. I'm pretty sure it was one of these WORM drives now. What a nostalgia trip!
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Jim
I had to admin a couple NT 4 jukeboxes that used these disks. I don't think portability was ever a selling point. Long term warm/cold storage for financials was what we used them for. I bought one that uses up to 4 gig R/W drives. Somewhere is a crate of these disks with all my edonkey/overnet backups. This inspired me to see if I can get it going on a modern system.
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I had to admin a couple NT 4 jukeboxes that used these disks. I don't think portability was ever a selling point. Long term warm/cold storage for financials was what we used them for. I bought one that uses up to 4 gig R/W drives. Somewhere is a crate of these disks with all my edonkey/overnet backups. This inspired me to see if I can get it going on a modern system.
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Ang
I've a feeling those marks are not data, but the means by which the laser finds the sectors/help it seek- DVD-ram has a similar kind of arrangement.
Also, a slight nitpick CDs are more a plastic disk coated in metal- the data is encoded by engraving/embossing the plastic, the metal coating is just there to bring that into relief
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I've a feeling those marks are not data, but the means by which the laser finds the sectors/help it seek- DVD-ram has a similar kind of arrangement.
Also, a slight nitpick CDs are more a plastic disk coated in metal- the data is encoded by engraving/embossing the plastic, the metal coating is just there to bring that into relief
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tkteun
These were still in wide use in the publishing world in the early 2000's. Since the full dpi files were so big, it took DVDs and portable hard drives (CF disk) to replace them. Still very common to sneakernet these files to the printer's. Remember there being a special program on MacOS 9 for erasing and filling them.
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These were still in wide use in the publishing world in the early 2000's. Since the full dpi files were so big, it took DVDs and portable hard drives (CF disk) to replace them. Still very common to sneakernet these files to the printer's. Remember there being a special program on MacOS 9 for erasing and filling them.
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dav
I did MO/WORM drives for years. We wrote WORM drivers where subsequent writes to a particular sector were written elsewhere and a remap table was used to find the data. Since every OS needs to format a disk, WORM couldn't be used without a special driver. Even if you used it like a tape, it still would need a driver.
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I did MO/WORM drives for years. We wrote WORM drivers where subsequent writes to a particular sector were written elsewhere and a remap table was used to find the data. Since every OS needs to format a disk, WORM couldn't be used without a special driver. Even if you used it like a tape, it still would need a driver.
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William
The disc inside looks a lot like a DVD-RAM with its sector markers glinting under the lights. One of the peculiarities of the DVD-RAM system is that it stores data more like a HDD than an optical drive, which you mentioned this does as well. I wonder if this is a predecessor to that technology.
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The disc inside looks a lot like a DVD-RAM with its sector markers glinting under the lights. One of the peculiarities of the DVD-RAM system is that it stores data more like a HDD than an optical drive, which you mentioned this does as well. I wonder if this is a predecessor to that technology.
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