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 sporadic. Perhaps the drive isn’t in top shape or the media is somehow degraded, but this is unexpected, as the recording density is the lowest at the outer edge. Nevertheless, the drive cache also steps in and muddles up the write curve graph. The average speed is 0.6MB/s read and 0.3MB/s write.

The Fujitsu cartridge is practically a mirror-image of the above result. The same issue with the outer zone with an almost identical curve shape – I wonder why. But these would likely be the oldest cartridges in the lot, being the oldest format.

230MB Type

The TDK 230MB disc managed to pass the test but with again some slowdowns in the outermost zone. Throughput averages 0.9MB/s read and 0.3MB/s write.

The Philips 230MB cartridge achieves virtually a carbon-copy result. I wonder if the anomalies on the outer tracks are just an artifact of HD Tune Pro’s I/O handling.

540MB Type

The Verbatim 540MB disc passes the test, with some bumps in the outermost zone. Average read is 1.6MB/s with…