Panasonic mini disk

It is in the last Techmoan video I posted and on Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc#Format_extensions
to summarise standard Minidisc uses about a 5 to 1 compression ratio to fit a CD on a 200MByte ish disc.
I don't think it would have replaced CD as people would still have to have got the music from somewhere.
In the Youtube comments someone commented that they bought one pre-recorded Minidisc to try and then realised that for the same money they could buy the CD and a £1 blank mini disc to record it on to. I would guess that most people did this using an analogue connection. Until the Net-MD players you couldn't hook them up to a computer, and once you could Sony's Sonic Stage software had a reputation of making iTunes seem like the pinnacle of good software design.

The thing that surprised me was that (unlike DAT) Minidisc didn't ever become a computer storage medium especially when rival Zip discs were so popular. The 1GB HiMD discs would have been even better. I recently solved that mystery, finding out that Sony backed a different disc format for computer storage which turned out to be so bad they ended up doing a product recall and then keeping very quiet about it. By that time Recordable CDs and burners had reached a price and reliability that they made Zip and all other similar formats look old fashioned.

 

This is the one I was thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_HiFD
I don't know why they didn't use MiniDisc since they seem to have been around the same capacity although maybe the requirements for an audio disc (which only has to play in real time) and a Data Disc (that needs quick random access and 100% reliability are different. Add the fact Sony has a long history of releasing obscure formats which don't catch on (and I don't mean MiniDisc).

 

When you start a thread here is a photo for it.


All just fished out of the filing cabinet next to my computer. I used LS120 back in the day. I am sure I had both an internal and external drive. The LS120 would read and write normal floppies far faster than a normal drive. I'm sure neither drive cost more than £100.

As the label implies the ZIP discs were picked up when you could get a second hand drive and discs for £5.

Something to add of relevance to both MiniDisc and DCC is that all of these devices predate USB, typically connecting through a parallel printer port. A DCC unit that could connect directly to a computer came out years before MiniDisc could but apparently only a few thousand of the necessary cable were made. I don't think MiniDisc supported computer connection until USB came out which made me think of this famous demonstration

Have you tried using a USB Thumbdrive with a Windows 98 computer? You have to find and load a driver that works with that particular brand of Thumbdrive.

Finally for people interested in all the Floptical computer formats I found this article that explains them quite well and shows the drive I had / have somewhere
https://goughlui.com/2012/11/02/tech-flashback-iomega-zip-100-and-the-superdisk-ls-120/