Convenience and OS support > Unlike CD and DVD, you don't need any special program like Toast or the notoriously unreliable DirectCD to work with MO. The OS sees an MO drive exactly as if it were another hard drive. OS support for MO is built into OS 9.2 and OS X, as well as all versions of Windows from 95 on up. OS 8.6 and below requires Fujitsu's MO Extension, which is bulletproof. PC-formatted MO disks are automatically readable on the Mac. Mac-formatted MO disks require Mac-Opener or a similar driver to be readable on the PC.

Moreover, all MO disks are already low-level formatted. You just have to do a 10-second high level format on the Mac or PC, and they're ready to use.

Why doesn't everyone use MO? > The only thing storage gurus don't understand about MO is why it hasn't become more popular in the US. It is wildly popular in Japan, and moderately popular in Europe, but in America it is primarily used in niche areas where reliable storage is absolutely critical and data simply cannot be lost: hospitals, government agencies, and so on. It is also used by desktop publishers and photographers, mostly on the Mac platform.

There's no reason at all for the rest of us not to use MO, except the price of the cartridges: $20 for 2.3 GB, $12 for 1.3 GB, $8 for 640MB. I don't consider that unreasonable for bulletproof data storage. Compare it to Zip 750, an unreliable superfloppy technology, overpriced at $12 for just 750 MB. Nevertheless, the allure of the cheap CD/DVD is great.

It all comes down to one thing: do you care about your data enough to spend a few bucks on MO, or don't you? And by the way, ye penny pinchers, wait and see how much time and money you waste the next time you have a hard disk failure and you don't have recent backups, or your backup media -- tape, DVD, CD, Jaz, Zip -- fails. MO is the best insurance you can buy against data loss. Sure, MO can fail too. But the chances of that happening are much, much slimmer than with any other storage medium available to us. When the first 1.3 GB drives came out three years ago, I had concerns. How could they reliably write 1.3 GB of data onto a tiny 3.5-inch cartridge? But in the years since, I have not had a single read or write error with an MO drive. I've had the same error-free experience with the 2.3 GB drives. Fujitsu has done wonders with its read/write heads over the last few years.

Speed > As with most removable storage, transfer speed can be extremely fast for large files, but quite slow for small files, even though the access time for the DynaMO 2300 is a speedy 19 ms. Therefore, unless you are using a special backup program, it is much faster to compress small files first with Stuffit, and then copy them to MO (or CD, DVD, etc.) than it is to do a straight copy.

Appearance > For the past few years, Fujitsu has been a leader in stylish, diminutive enclosures, and the latest one is the smallest and the best, with a whisper quiet fan that only runs on the rare occasion when the unit heats up. (Heat buildup in an MO drive is due to rapid disk spin, not to laser heat.) Even then, the fan's noise is barely discernible. It would be great if Apple could use this technology in its new "Windtunnel" G4 desktops.

Interface > The DynaMO 2300 U2 we tested connects with a USB 2 interface. That means it can be used with any USB-capable Mac, but that top transfer speed is limited to 12 megabits per second. This is not too bad when you are transferring smaller files, or a mix of large and small files. But you would really want USB 2, or an IDE connection, if you had a lot of large files. To compare USB 1.1 and 2.0 capabilities with this drive, we had to test on a Dell 8100 Inspiron laptop with Keyspan's USB 2 card.

USB 2.0 can, theoretically, be used with OS X, provided you have a USB 2.0 card on either your desktop Mac or Powerbook (Keyspan and others provide both), and that you have special drivers. However, this is something I personally would not want to get into until Apple's support of USB 2.0 becomes more wholehearted. The day will have to come soon, since USB 2.0 has become the dominant fast connectivity standard in the rest of the industry. Apple's bid to have its peerless Firewire become the dominant connectivity standard for the PC industry failed when it lost the industry's confidence by initially asking for an exorbitant royalty fee. By the time Apple asked a reasonable royalty fee, it was too late: USB 2.0 was well on its way. It's here, it's great, and way too many manufacturers today are saving money by making new peripherals USB2-only, instead of Firewire/USB2. Firewire is still a wonderful standard, but if current trends continue, it will always have to take second place to USB 2.0.

Many PCs, for example, from Dell, now have both Firewire and USB 2.0 connectivity. Apple, for so long a leader in connectivity, needs to catch up with the rest of the industry in this respect. One of the main reasons we buy Macs is because they are more connectable than PCs. Dells have serial, parallel, USB 2, Firewire, and Ethernet 10/100 built in -- not to mention floppy. Apple only offers USB 1.1, Firewire, and Ethernet. Something's wrong with this picture.

There is an alternative. Fujitsu has [$249] internal versions of this drive, available either with SCSI or IDE interfaces, so they can be attached to any Mac. You can also pop the drive into one of the many enclosures that let you connect IDE devices via Firewire.

Summary > MO is the preferred storage medium for users who need arhicival-quality, fast rewritable access and cannot afford to lose so much as a byte of data. As the costs of losing data spiral, we expect to see MO usage increase over the next 12 months.