EXCLUSIVES

Safe Storage
Words by Bill Troop
March 2004

As regular readers know, we consider magneto-optical (MO) cartridges to be the single most reliable way to backup and exchange digital data. MO drives are extremely popular in Japan and Europe, where bulletproof data storage is a paramount concern. But here in the US, for reasons we have never been able to discover, most of the few users who backup at all are content to entrust their data to dicier solutions, such as removable hard drives and low quality CD and DVD disks.

Fujitsu is now the only manufacturer marketing 3.5" MO drives in the US. Among its primary market are hospitals and government agencies where long-term data integrity is essential. But MO has some adherents among the rest of us. There has always been a loyal core of Mac® users who use MO, perhaps because of the high number of creative professionals who use Macs: artists, photographers and designers who won't trust their data-which is their creativity and their livelihood-to anything less than the best.

More business users and legal professionals who must have reliable data storage also use MO-now that they are learning the perils of trusting other media. Needless to say, the entertainment industry uses MO widely as well.

Fujitsu's latest MO drive is its most convenient; powered by your computer's USB bus, it doesn't even require a power supply. The $199 DynaMO 1300 Pocket Drive weighs just 15 ounces and is 23mm thin.

It reads and writes all MO disks from the oldest 128MB up to 1.3GB. (Its $349 sibling, the DynaMO 2300, can use cartridges up to 2.3GB, but requires more power than the USB bus can deliver; with the 1300, in the interests of ultra-portability, Fujitsu limited the top capacity to 1.3GB cartridges, which are large enough for most users.) For more details on the 2300 and MO vs CD/DVD, see our reviews.

Fujitsu is notably conservative about rating the life expectancy of its MO cartridges at 50 years, tested according to ANSI specs. By contrast, there are plenty of CD and DVD manufacturers out there claiming 100 years for their unprotected disks. Those claims are not sustainable, and every manufacturer in the storage business will privately admit that MO is far and away today's most reliable storage medium.

MO is unquestionably the most durable medium available today. It is immune to stray immune magnetic fields-the bugbear of hard drives, tape, Zips, and floppies-and vastly more resistant to physical and environmental damage than CDs and DVDs.

Convenience and built-in OS support

MO also has very strong conveniences as opposed to CD and DVD. MO appears to the operating system (be it any version of Mac or Windows®) as just another drive. So there's none of this tiresome nonsense of having to gather files and burn a CD/DVD into the right format. MO is truly drag and drop.

On Windows, there are solutions for drag-and-drop recording using both CD and DVD, but these are still so buggy after all these years. Despite that, Roxio®/Adaptec® gave up on DirectCD for Mac years ago. Perversely, MO remains the one reliable drag-and-drop backup/file exchange medium in the computer industry.

Another MO advantage is that error correction is built in. No CD/DVD format has built-in error correction besides DVD-RAM and that format is unfortunately on its way out. In addition, all MO cartridges are pre-formatted-you just have to do a quick 10-second high level format on Mac or PC. Cross-platform compatibility is great too: Macs automatically read PC-formatted cartridges and PCs can read Mac-formatted cartridges with MacOpener.

Media Cost

MO is definitely more expensive than CD/DVD. A 1.3GB cartridge retails for $12. Any way you look at it, MO is more expensive than CD/DVD. But mass-produced, high volume CD/DVDs, even the best, are still nowhere near as bulletproof as MO. (Indeed, the optical industry admits this and is now marketing premium priced CDs and DVDs for users interested in archival quality.) Recordable CD/DVDs rely on dyes to hold their data; and dyes, even the best, are inherently unstable. Ultimately, it depends on how important your data is to you. If it's worth $12 a gigabyte, you'll use MO. If it's worth just a dollar a gigabyte, you'll use CD/DVD. Now, needless to say, all media can fail-that's why a good backup strategy will always include more than one set of backup media. And not that CD/DVD, given its economy, doesn't have an important place in backup. It just shouldn't be the primary place.

We think every second we spend on the computer is worth money. We can't afford to lose any of that effort. So, we backup with MO. For those who do much of their work on the road, the DynaMO 1300 will let you backup important files as you create them. You also have the additional comfort of knowing that if your laptop is lost or stolen, you still have those MO cartridges in your pocket.

Speed

As with most removable storage, transfer speed can be fast for large files, but slow for large groups of small files, even though the access time for the DynaMO 1300 Portable is just [19] ms. Therefore, unless you are using a special backup program, it is 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

The DynaMO 1300 Portable is attractive and tiny. The best compliment we can pay is to say that that it's almost Jobs-like in styling. It's nice to see that some of the best storage device manufacturers-Plextor and Fujitsu-are giving their well-built products the style they deserve.