LGR Oddware - MiniDisc Data Storage: Sony MDH-10
video description
Date: 2022-04-14
Related videos
Comments and reviews: 10
CalzoneManiac's
It's almost as if most, if not all of Sony's failures can be attributed to their forcing proprietary technology on people.
VHS could store much more picture than Beta could and were a lot cheaper for picture quality that in reality was mostly the same despite what marketing made people believe.
Mini-discs never caught on because people preferred CDs which were much cheaper since the supply wasn't being controlled by one company. Luckily Sony was smart enough to stick with mainstream formats with the PS1 and PS2 which worked out fantastically on their behalf.
Sony got EXTREMELY lucky with Blu-ray, had it lost to HD DVD, it's likely the PS3 would have completely failed unless they went the route Microsoft took with the Xbox 360 and put their titles on DVD.
Then they forced users to buy their expensive memory cards for the Vita instead of using SD, which was one of the reasons that console flopped as hard as it did.
Reminds me of a certain company today.
reply
It's almost as if most, if not all of Sony's failures can be attributed to their forcing proprietary technology on people.
VHS could store much more picture than Beta could and were a lot cheaper for picture quality that in reality was mostly the same despite what marketing made people believe.
Mini-discs never caught on because people preferred CDs which were much cheaper since the supply wasn't being controlled by one company. Luckily Sony was smart enough to stick with mainstream formats with the PS1 and PS2 which worked out fantastically on their behalf.
Sony got EXTREMELY lucky with Blu-ray, had it lost to HD DVD, it's likely the PS3 would have completely failed unless they went the route Microsoft took with the Xbox 360 and put their titles on DVD.
Then they forced users to buy their expensive memory cards for the Vita instead of using SD, which was one of the reasons that console flopped as hard as it did.
Reminds me of a certain company today.
reply
Frank
I have one of these drives and it's also faulty. Mine doesn't read discs at all, but you could try running yours upside-down or on one side to see if it'll function better (often the lens suspension gets weak and can't properly focus but being upside-down or on one side can help it overcome this, at least for a while.
3. 5- MO drives are usually pretty good but sometimes there are compatibility problems with some systems (for example I can't get System 7-based Macs to work with 640MB discs but they're fine with 230MB or smaller. Honestly I'm not the biggest fan of Zip disks but they were by far the easiest to work with, least expensive, and the most portable of the high-capacity removable media formats. They were also usually fast enough to be a main boot volume on most vintage computers, something MO doesn't do well unless in a read-only configuration.
reply
I have one of these drives and it's also faulty. Mine doesn't read discs at all, but you could try running yours upside-down or on one side to see if it'll function better (often the lens suspension gets weak and can't properly focus but being upside-down or on one side can help it overcome this, at least for a while.
3. 5- MO drives are usually pretty good but sometimes there are compatibility problems with some systems (for example I can't get System 7-based Macs to work with 640MB discs but they're fine with 230MB or smaller. Honestly I'm not the biggest fan of Zip disks but they were by far the easiest to work with, least expensive, and the most portable of the high-capacity removable media formats. They were also usually fast enough to be a main boot volume on most vintage computers, something MO doesn't do well unless in a read-only configuration.
reply
Ralph
If I was Sony, I would have tried to make it cheaper, not messed with the compatibility, and bundled them with Pocket PCs. They could have advertised them as full on PC replacements since you could load software directly from the minidisk drive without needing to sync up with a PC, and you'd get a digital music format that's more reliable than a discman and can be recorded like a cassette tape.
Hell, they could have created a -mini-lifestyle- campaign or something by throwing in a VCR that used Hi8 tapes. Get yourself a video Walkman to watch all your favorite movies and shows wherever you want, a high quality digital audio recorder that doesn't skip whenever someone coughs from five miles away and that doubles as a data storage drive, and a fully fledged PC in the palm of your hand, all of which fits in your pocket. I'd buy it.
reply
If I was Sony, I would have tried to make it cheaper, not messed with the compatibility, and bundled them with Pocket PCs. They could have advertised them as full on PC replacements since you could load software directly from the minidisk drive without needing to sync up with a PC, and you'd get a digital music format that's more reliable than a discman and can be recorded like a cassette tape.
Hell, they could have created a -mini-lifestyle- campaign or something by throwing in a VCR that used Hi8 tapes. Get yourself a video Walkman to watch all your favorite movies and shows wherever you want, a high quality digital audio recorder that doesn't skip whenever someone coughs from five miles away and that doubles as a data storage drive, and a fully fledged PC in the palm of your hand, all of which fits in your pocket. I'd buy it.
reply
Channel
Somebody has probably already said this, but the reason for MD data and MD audio are incompatible is because there was all sorts of music rights royalties that had to be paid on audio MD's. In theory, if you have a blank audio MD then you've paid your royalty to record on it already, but with the MD data drive you have not and with the MD data discs you have not either (even though they were several times the price) hence why you can play music but not write music/ It's why -CD-R for music- were more expensive than just plain CD-R and why the record industry was so pissed off when a computer allowed you to record audio onto a CD-R instead of demanding a -CD-R for music- like a component CD recorder does.
reply
Somebody has probably already said this, but the reason for MD data and MD audio are incompatible is because there was all sorts of music rights royalties that had to be paid on audio MD's. In theory, if you have a blank audio MD then you've paid your royalty to record on it already, but with the MD data drive you have not and with the MD data discs you have not either (even though they were several times the price) hence why you can play music but not write music/ It's why -CD-R for music- were more expensive than just plain CD-R and why the record industry was so pissed off when a computer allowed you to record audio onto a CD-R instead of demanding a -CD-R for music- like a component CD recorder does.
reply
Ralph
They should have made it properly compatible with regular audio minidiscs, perhaps after a reformat at worst, and then launched it along side an ms-dos PC with a sound blaster compatible sound card, a PDA, and a printer and had all of them communicate primarily through IrDa, with cables as a backup. Just think, an amateur musician could record instruments on the MDH-10, beam the clips to the PC to edit them together into a song, beam it back to the MDH-10 to record the finished song on an audio disc, then write and print a letter and submit the whole thing to a music label, and then play Commander Keen to unwind. That would have been some real cyberpunk stuff and might have helped it get off the ground.
reply
They should have made it properly compatible with regular audio minidiscs, perhaps after a reformat at worst, and then launched it along side an ms-dos PC with a sound blaster compatible sound card, a PDA, and a printer and had all of them communicate primarily through IrDa, with cables as a backup. Just think, an amateur musician could record instruments on the MDH-10, beam the clips to the PC to edit them together into a song, beam it back to the MDH-10 to record the finished song on an audio disc, then write and print a letter and submit the whole thing to a music label, and then play Commander Keen to unwind. That would have been some real cyberpunk stuff and might have helped it get off the ground.
reply
Felonius
-I had 2- floppy disks (720k) in the late 80s (87-89ish, but I never saw them anywhere else. These were seen as a standard 5. 25 or 8- floppy drive, and worked flawlessly. The only real difference was speed: they were --_blazingly_-- fast for floppies! Two to Three times faster. I had a bunch of the drives (from a job lot outlet, but finding media (at least in the USA) was extremely difficult. We ended up using the 2- drives for -secret- data, since very few people could read them if they were lost or stolen. Obscurity is sometimes enough! -
reply
-I had 2- floppy disks (720k) in the late 80s (87-89ish, but I never saw them anywhere else. These were seen as a standard 5. 25 or 8- floppy drive, and worked flawlessly. The only real difference was speed: they were --_blazingly_-- fast for floppies! Two to Three times faster. I had a bunch of the drives (from a job lot outlet, but finding media (at least in the USA) was extremely difficult. We ended up using the 2- drives for -secret- data, since very few people could read them if they were lost or stolen. Obscurity is sometimes enough! -
reply
HECKLER
Say LGR! You should take a look at the Sony M-O disk format sometime. It-s a pretty curious format that-s like a mix between a floppy disk and DVD RAM, and though it-s similar to DVD RAM it-s also quite different. Think the Mini Disk and UMD but with two 5. 2GB storage parts on either side and uses a super large SCSI based drive.
(I actually have one of these drives and a disk and it-s a very curious device. Don-t know if it works though since I don-t have a machine that supports SCSI)
reply
Say LGR! You should take a look at the Sony M-O disk format sometime. It-s a pretty curious format that-s like a mix between a floppy disk and DVD RAM, and though it-s similar to DVD RAM it-s also quite different. Think the Mini Disk and UMD but with two 5. 2GB storage parts on either side and uses a super large SCSI based drive.
(I actually have one of these drives and a disk and it-s a very curious device. Don-t know if it works though since I don-t have a machine that supports SCSI)
reply
Weapon
I remember entering a contest in Keyboard magazine to win a Sony digital multitrack recorder that wrote on Mini disc data discs in 1996 when I was in Highschool. In fact the digital multitrack recorder I ended up buying, a Roland VS-840EX (with a 250MB ZIP drive, had an optical output for recording directly to Mini Disc audio format. I recorded so much audio through that output, it was cool having a red light emit through a 3. 5mm fiber optic cable. .. -I'm recording lazers-. ..
reply
I remember entering a contest in Keyboard magazine to win a Sony digital multitrack recorder that wrote on Mini disc data discs in 1996 when I was in Highschool. In fact the digital multitrack recorder I ended up buying, a Roland VS-840EX (with a 250MB ZIP drive, had an optical output for recording directly to Mini Disc audio format. I recorded so much audio through that output, it was cool having a red light emit through a 3. 5mm fiber optic cable. .. -I'm recording lazers-. ..
reply
LGR
Bit of MiniDisc movie trivia for ya:
Near the beginning of _The Matrix, _ Neo sells a guy some valuable data written on what is presumably an MD Data disc. But if you pause the scene and look closely, especially on the higher-resolution releases of the movie, you can see that Neo's actually handing off a -TDK Studio- _audio_ MiniDisc. Which, as discussed in this Oddware episode, was not compatible with MD Data storage and did not store computer data. But it sure looked cool!
reply
Bit of MiniDisc movie trivia for ya:
Near the beginning of _The Matrix, _ Neo sells a guy some valuable data written on what is presumably an MD Data disc. But if you pause the scene and look closely, especially on the higher-resolution releases of the movie, you can see that Neo's actually handing off a -TDK Studio- _audio_ MiniDisc. Which, as discussed in this Oddware episode, was not compatible with MD Data storage and did not store computer data. But it sure looked cool!
reply
vinny142
I bought a similar device way back then and learned the hard way that it had one quite insane rule; it would only deal with files that had valid DRM on it, so I could only put files on it that had a valid -free to use- licence in them. That meant that all my personal recordings where disallowed. Obviously I brought it back the next day, what good is a minidisc writer that basically will not write any files at al.
reply
I bought a similar device way back then and learned the hard way that it had one quite insane rule; it would only deal with files that had valid DRM on it, so I could only put files on it that had a valid -free to use- licence in them. That meant that all my personal recordings where disallowed. Obviously I brought it back the next day, what good is a minidisc writer that basically will not write any files at al.
reply
Add a review, comment
Other channel videos
