Sony SMO-E301F 128MB magneto-optical drive

[Alex Eisenhut]

Gambled on an as-is eBay item with no specifics, it looked like a 21MB floptical drive in an external enclosure. But no model# or inside photos.
It revealed itself to be a higher end Sony SMO-E301F drive.

Anyone ever play with this stuff? For sure out of my reach back then! 1000$ US in '93 would be about 2600$ CDN now.

I'm kinda itching to get it working with my Commodore 64 and my SCSI controller. It's clean, it powers up.

There's just not a lot of hits on google.

Were these things reliable? Known failures? Click of death kinda stuff?

What did you use them for? These seem high-end for sure.

[Halcyon]

Yep, I have a few magneto-optical drives at home. MO was pretty reliable as a storage medium. I don't really know anything about the specific unit you have, but all the ones I have still work just fine.

[Alex Eisenhut]

The build quality of the drive is quite high. The powered enclosure also: very thick plastic case, solidly put together, heavy.
The drive uses roller bearings for all the sliding metal bits, the gears all look thick (none of those paper-thin gears like in Walkmans), just solid stuff.
There is something enjoyable in seeing state of the art high end stuff even if decades obsolete.
Sure you can get 1000 times the storage on a 10$ USB thumb drive but does that come with a picture of a jaguar cougar on it? Didn't think so.

[helius]

This is the first 3.5" magneto-optical format. It was developed further into 230MB, 540MB, 640MB, 1.3GB and 2.3GB, mostly backwards-compatible if I recall correctly. Some MO formats were "direct-overwrite" (DOW), meaning writing could be accomplished in fewer passes. I never quite understood how they did that.

5.25" magneto-optical drives were produced first and were almost all double-sided (eject the cartridge, flip it over, reinsert it). The 3.5" cartridges couldn't be flipped.

Because the data is stored in frozen magnetic domains that can only be changed by heating to thousands of degrees, the media has potential as archival storage.