90mm M.O. Adventures: Part 3 – Performance Tests, Sounds & Reflections

In the first part, I managed to rescue a precious M.O. drive which allowed me to embark on this journey to experience 90mm M.O. firsthand. In the second part, I collected a bunch of media and perused the freely-available standards documents to learn more. In this part, the rubber finally hits the road, as we see what the M.O. disks and drive can do, after 24-34 (estimated) years. Sequential Speed For initial benchmarking, I decided to use HD Tune Pro as I always do. One thing I did have to do was to reduce the block size to 64KB, as the drive seemed to struggle with larger accesses and become absurdly slow. I’m not sure, but I suspect this may be because of the internal drive cache and the USB 2.0 interface – even in the burst-rate benches, the drive is not able to saturate USB 2.0 likely because the controller itself was never designed with that bandwidth in mind. 128MB Type The Mitsubishi disc managed the read and write just fine except the outer zone readback seems to be a bit…