from Martin Bertelsmann <m_bert@sol.wh-hms.uni-ulm.de>:

>What about a Magneto Optical Disk? It's much more reliable than a ZIP. The
>storage capactiy is larger (up to 1.3 GB on a 3.5" medium (soon 2.3GB).
>For larger data amounts its also cheaper than ZIP (expensive drive with
>cheap media vs cheap zip drive and expensive zip media). Fujitsu makes
>IMHO good drives. Mine do run fine under NetBSD (i do have a raw netbsd
>system on a mo medium as well).

What do you mean by a "raw" netbsd system?  I think the Fujitsu DynaMO disks
have sector size 2048 bytes, don't know if that will remain true with the
upcoming 2.3 GB disks.  I wanted to know if DOS could handle this; saw in a
HOWTO that newer Linux kernels supported these disks, and have the same question
regarding (Free, Net and Open)BSD.  EIDE (ATAPI) drive would be the first
version of the 2.3 GB drive to be released.

I wouldn't know whether to install that as slave on the primary IDE channel,
where master is a Western Digital 40 GB hard drive, or as slave on the secondary
channel, where master is a Plextor CD-RW.  I would prefer primary channel if
possible; currently have mobile rack (for hard drives) as slave on the secondary
channel because it wouldn't physically fit on the primary channel, came up
against the motherboard.  I also might want DVD-RAM or RW in the future, when
standards are settled; don't want to buy now only to find in a half-year that it
was the wrong type.

I noticed that Castlewood (http://www.castlewood.com) recently released a
5.7 GB version of their Orb drive but can't speak for reliability.  Syquest (now
bankrupt) SyJet and Iomega Zip and Jaz drives have had problems; I am one of
many victims.