Fujitsu's latest external 3.5in. Magneto-Optical (MO) drive weighs less than 410g and is small enough to fits inside a jacket pocket. Unfortunately, MO technology has gone mostly unnoticed, never really taking off as a portable data solution. Other more affordable solutions including ZIP, JAZ, and even DVD have come along and are more widely used, leaving MO by the wayside. There are more convenient and lower priced MO drives available, but Fujitsu's DynaMO 1300U2 Pocket offers an enticing combination of performance and reliability at a reasonable price if you're looking for reliable backup solution that can be used for archiving small amounts of data at a time.

Pros: Small and light; powered by USB port; reliable backups
Cons: Slower with less capacity than DVD; no mechanical eject button


Targeting mobile business workers, the DynaMO 1300U2 Pocket (108x143x23mm, 410g) offers a simple and secure solution for storing, backing up and transferring up to 1.3GB of data onto removable Magneto-Optical discs. The drive is powered by a USB port, so no external adapter is required, which helps to make it lighter when travelling and also easier to use.

The drive is finished in a stylish carbon-coated plastic housing which has a silver grey metallic look, and ships with a grey plastic pouch that has a pocket to store the required USB cable, which is also supplied with the unit. There's also a matching stand provided, should you want to use the drive in a vertical position.

The DynaMO 1300U2 Pocket is backwards compatible with 640-, 540-, 230-, and 128MB discs (90mm), which fit inside the 3.5in. cartridge. Other features of the drive include an internal data transfer rate of 3.2- to 5.5MB/s, average access time of 45ms, and rotational speed of 3000rpm. It connects to your computer using High-speed USB 2.0 (480Mbit/s). Incidentally, a 1.3GB Magneto-Optical disc currently costs around £6 (ex. VAT), making the price-per-MB less than 0.01 pence.

Magneto-Optical disc technology utilises a combination of optical and magnetic recording components to deliver reliable backups. When recording, a laser beam, in combination with a magnetic field, is used to record data bits onto a specially coated optical disc. The recording layer on an Magneto-Optical disc is able to retain a magnetic field without being affected by external magnetic fields at normal temperatures.

This coating, however, has the characteristic that the strength of the magnetic field decreases as temperature rises. When the temperature of a particular spot reaches about 300° C, called the Curie temperature, the magnetic field orientation can be altered by the magnetic recording component of the drive. Individual data bits are recorded on the disk through this process. When the temperature cools to below 300°C, the magnetic domain on the disc recording surface becomes fixed again, and will not be affected by external magnetic fields.

One of the specific advantages of Magneto-Optical recording technology compared to other optical discs, such as CD or DVD, is the ability to record, erase, and record data up to 10 million times. This gives you the same rewritable recording capability of traditional magnetic storage media, while providing the high reliability inherent in optical storage technology.

And because Magneto-Optical recording technology is designed around a rugged polycarbonate disc platter, mounted inside an enclosed cartridge, the cartridge helps to protect the disc surface from physical damage and dust contamination, while providing an easy to handle storage unit. Another important feature is that Magneto-Optical discs are better suited to archiving because they remain stable for longer periods of time. Fujitsu claims they are good for more than 50 years, compared to 10 years for CDs or DVDs.

Magneto-Optical discs are slightly larger than a regular 3.5in. floppy disk but can hold a great deal more data, ranging from 100MB up to numerous gigabytes, although the DynaMO 1300U2 Pocket is limited to reading and writing to 1.3GB media. Should you want more capacity, Fujitsu also offers the bigger and bulkier DynaMO 1300U2 Pocket for storing up to 2.3GB of data on a single disc. Similar to traditional floppy disks, Magneto-Optical discs have a little tab that you can move to prevent overwriting them.

Like floppy disks and re-writable DVDs, the 1.3GB Magneto-Optical disc supplied with the DynaMO 1300U2 Pocket had to be formatted before we could test the drive. Formatting can be done using Windows' built-in formatting tools, or with Fujitsu's MO disc formatter utility supplied on the driver CD-ROM. Formatting a single 1.3GB disc took 6m 38s to complete using a FAT32 file system.

Although the drive performed reliably and quietly in our tests, it's not without its faults. Most noticeable is that there's no mechanical eject button, so you have to power the drive in order to remove a disc. There is an emergency mechanical procedure in the event of a drive failure, but it's not designed for everyday use, so you have to use the software to eject discs - a real pain.

Another quirk is that by default, Windows XP and Windows 2000 users can only format or eject discs if they have administrator privileges. There is a separate Fujitsu utility supplied however, MO Eject Tool, that can be installed to allows administrators to grant format and eject privileges to others, automatically eject discs on shut down, as well as on restarts, hibernate, standby mode, and when logging off.

Fujitsu supplies a couple of the other software applications. The first, SecureMO Light28, lets you set a password to a 1.3GB or 2.3GB capacity disc in order to protect your data. Once you've saved your data on a password-protected disc, access to that data cannot be granted unless the password is entered correctly. When a locked disc is accessed from an application, such as Windows Explorer, an alert message is displayed. The final utility, Novastor's NovaDisk Backup, is a relatively basic disaster recovery solution.

BIOS, Oct 07, 04 | Print | Send | Comments (0) | Posted In Backup