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Is Sony's 140MB MiniDisc Drive the Next Betamax? (1996)
- Bluestein 5y agoFunny how this format keeps coming back into some sort of limelight every so often ...
- dogma1138 5y agoThe minidisc is the most “aesthetic” format ever made they simply looked cool, and today the have a retro futuristic look. Flash drives and portable NVME SSDs are awesome but they just look boring. The Zip Drive also never looked as cool both the drives and the disks looked rather boring compared to the minidisc.
- Arubis 5y agoAgreed; the minidisc nails the neotokyo vibe for me.
- xupybd 5y agoAbsolutely, if I could buy a reasonably priced MD player I would use that as my primary music source. I love the look. It's probably thanks to the matrix and the format being out of my reach as a teenager but oh so cool
- dogma1138 5y agoYeah I don’t know why but holding a semi transparent little plastic package with the disk visible inside thats about the same size a my Samsung 2TB USB 3.2 Gen 2 SSD and even knowing that it only holds 140MB or so which is probably less than the SRAM cache on the SSD still feels like the future despite being nearly 30 years old at this point.
- xupybd 5y agoYeah I'd love it if someone made fake MiniDiscs out modern storage. Just having a cartridge would be awesome
- reassembled 5y agoI think it's the fact that mindisc and CDs and other removable media had physical motion that some people find fascinating. As computers have become more powerful they've also become much less mechanical, at least at the human interaction scale. The physicality of human-computer interaction has almost been reduced to holding up a glass screen and either passively viewing or endlessly swiping, at least for many people.
- Bluestein 5y ago> The minidisc is the most “aesthetic” format ever made ... you are on to something here. (I mean, look at how many movies it shows up in :)
- TMWNN 5y agoAs Dogma1138 said, MiniDisc looks like the data format the future as imagined in 1970 would use. It could easily have appeared on UFO or 2001 or Star Wars or as late as Star Trek: TNG.
- Bluestein 5y ago> Star Trek: TNG I am convinced, if one looks hard enough a MiniDisc -has- to be found in some TNG episode :)
- dogma1138 5y agoI don’t think these were ever used in a Star Trek show, maybe enterprise. Sony’s memorystick flash storage did kinda look like the isolinear chips from TNG tho, back in the days where it was Sony or compact Flash/SmartMedia, the memorysticks also won on looks I swear I think that Sony was the only company that actually cared about how things looked in the 90’s and early 2000’s until Apple under Steve Jobs went through the whole look and feel first phase.
- Bluestein 5y ago> maybe enterprise. Good call. That'd fit better with the "timeline", in that retro-futuristic way :)
- gambiting 5y agoI think Mini Disc's ultimate and final evolution - Playstation Portable's UMDs - has inherited that trait. Yes they are slow, they are fragile, but damn it was cool to have games ship on those tiny discs that actually worked in a portable console.
- the8472 5y agoCaddies aren't unique to minidiscs though, CD caddies were a thing too for example. Or do you mean the portable players? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(hardware)#/media/File:Cd_caddies_JPG.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(hardware)#/media/File:C...
- detaro 5y agoYeah, but they don't match the aesthetics of a miniDisc. The small size, more "modern" design (fully transparent materials, more colorful, ...) just looks more futuristic. Ironically it also helps that self-recorded MDs were the more common option, so the discs aren't covered in labels/printing. (I have one modern prerecorded MD release, and while the printing is neat in some ways, it doesn't have that futuristic side as much)
- Bluestein 5y ago> t also helps that self-recorded MDs were the more common option, so the discs aren't covered in labels/printing. I hadn't thought of it, but you are right. (Then again cassettes were also mostly always used "naked" - as in, copied and devoid of labeling ... ... and they never reached MD-level cool :) ... though they might have seem like a very futuristic thing when first introduced.)
- Bluestein 5y agoI remember using a caddy in one of the first CD-ROMs, in high school, no less, instructed in the care and, particularly, the -feeding- of the CD Drive by the kind librarian :)
- mathewsanders 5y agoAlong with looking really cool, I think there were some other benefits as well. Having a self contained case, and a pretty small size that can easily fit in your palm was pretty practical. We’d go on road trips and it was nice to be able to eject a cartridge and just put it on the dash or whatever. Same as with a tape, making a recording was sort of time consuming because you couldn’t just drop files and burn to disk). Unlike a playlist that has infinite capacity, when recording to disk you had limited capacity so needed to make more careful editorial choices in your mix. It was really nice giving or receiving a mix that a friend had taken the time to make :)
- fomine3 5y agoI wish DVD-RAM with cartridge also took off. It seems that was it only a thing in Japan?
- amyjess 5y agoI could also say much the same about Magneto-Optical and Syquest disks. That aesthetic is just cool. (though I'd say that flash drives can be cool if you treat them as James Bond spy gear and get drives disguised as everyday objects or jewelry)
- Grustaf 5y agoSurely vinyl is the most aesthetic format! But I grant that MiniDisc is the prettiest and coolest portable format ever.
- amelius 5y agoI wish there were more posts about tape backup systems, and see some startup disrupt the market. Tape might seem slow to some people, but it's perfect for backup except the drives are too expensive right now.
- puzzlingcaptcha 5y agoYeah, there is a sharp divide where you can get a LTO-3 drive like Ultrium 920 for as little as $40 used while LTO-5 (first to support LTFS) and newer quickly go into hundreds and thousands of dollars. I actually considered getting an older one but was concerned about continued availability of media.
- smackeyacky 5y agoYou can get the media, but tape software for windows is a nightmare. Windows server 2019 doesn't support tape without hideously expensive 3rd party software or unuseable open source backup "solutions" that presume you have fifty boxes to manage. Linux it works ok though.
- puzzlingcaptcha 5y agoYes, that was my other concern, especially looking at long term storage - would I still find drivers for it (or the SCSI controllers) 10 years down the line. And even Linux has been purging unused/unmaintained drivers lately. As much as I liked the prospect of a little retro-computing side-project I ended up just burning a dozen BD-XL discs instead. Wouldn't really work for large volumes of data but this was just a personal backup.
- smackeyacky 5y agoI think the HP drives found in ML-350 servers and similar will likely be useable for a long time, but you seem to need the whole server, controller card combo. I have one of these servers but the tape drive is unused since some trial software i had expired. Not sure why it still costs thousands of dollars for tape backup software on a 10+ year old server.
- puzzlingcaptcha 5y agoHuh, I just finished watching a youtube video on MiniDisc's rise and fall, with some twists along the way (featuring DAT, DCC, CD and eventually the iPod) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCK89V4NpJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCK89V4NpJY What I didn't know is that it has had a bit of a resurgence in a niche of retro enthusiasts, with limited indie hip-hop/waporwave/future funk releases as blank media continue to be made by Sony.
- neals 5y agoThanks for that link. Such a nostalgic trip through the '90s.
- buggeryorkshire 5y agoTechmoan has quite the collection of MiniDisc players and some really interesting videos about them https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU3BceoMuaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU3BceoMuaA
- rntksi 5y agoThanks for the link. The video was pretty informative. I'm not from the US, had a different experience. We went from tape to CDs pretty quickly, and had some niche MDs market.
- jhoechtl 5y agoFunny you mention DCC, I always though it to be superior over DAT as a DCC-player could operate audio cassette but I think their sales even dwarfed compared to DAT.
- cronix 5y agoI was just about to post that video. It popped up in my feed the other day and was really good! I still have a minidisc player somewhere.
- aunty_helen 5y agohttp://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html Somebodies probably trying to sell you something. I just got the same video on youtube. It's a very sublte form of marketing that plants ideas or breads knowledge before it's needed. For example, remember all those articles that came out about the Max Headroom tv hack a few years ago? And then six months later Eminem is dressed as Max Headroom in his rap god video. An obscure cultural reference that you probably wouldn't get unless you were preconditioned. So in six months time when a song or movie or product comes out and it's got mini disc references, you'll know.
- agumonkey 5y agoHa, I never thought about digging on old articles on this topic. - Sony announced the MiniDisc in September 1992 - Windows 3.1 ... by Microsoft ..., released on April 6, 1992 In windows 3.1 days floppies were the norm, jaz and zip were expensive and not so common.. minidiscs would have been so damn crazy cool as main storage format. So many alternative timelines..
- lxgr 5y agoMy thoughts exactly when I got my first MiniDisc recorder: "Why are we still using floppy disks instead of this?"
- agumonkey 5y agoI don't know about you, but in my area we started to see more MDs around the Sharp 722 days [0]. Later on Sony started to make them more afordable and featureful. That's quite a few years of void there. [0] apparently 1998 http://www.minidisc.org/part_Sharp_MD-MS721+MS722.html http://www.minidisc.org/part_Sharp_MD-MS721+MS722.html
- eliaspro 5y agoOh the nostalgia... I bought an 701 when it came out. I spent soo much time adding proper metadata to the music on my MDs, I feel like I could still use the device blindly because it is ingrained that deep into muscle memory although I haven't used it anymore since 22 years.
- orev 5y agoMagneto-Optical drives were also available at that time, and were designed for data storage. The problem was they were very expensive, and needed a SCSI interface at the time when personal computers mostly had IDE. There really was no good solution to the interface problem until USB and SATA came along.
- dghughes 5y ago
- lxgr 5y agoReminder for everyone wanting to indulge in some MiniDisc nostalgia: There is now a webapp that allows sending MP3s to WebMD recorders over USB: https://stefano.brilli.me/webminidisc/ https://stefano.brilli.me/webminidisc/
- gambiting 5y agoFor a second I was very confused what does a medical advice website have to do with MP3s ;-)
- hypnoscripto 5y agoIs this what Gamecube used?
- rijoja 5y agono
- rijoja 5y agoWhat is with the downvotes? My answer is correct.
- hinoki 5y agoGameCube used a mini DVD, but broke with the standard by using constant angular velocity instead of constant linear velocity. So the drive always spun at the same rpm, where regular DVDs spin slower the closer they read head is to the centre. This made them cheaper to make, and impossible to copy with a regular DVD burner.
- aahacks 5y agoGameCube can play backups from a burner. It requires either a modchip or Swiss with Action Replay. Also a laser adjustment may also be needed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUQ1GFPG9q0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUQ1GFPG9q0
- sackerhews 5y agoI remember the Sony MiniDisk audio recorder/player. You could record digital audio, but couldn't transfer it to your computer in digital format. Due to the possibility that you might not have had license to record what you recorded, then you couldn't have a digital version of it on your computer. This was the end of my relationship with Sony.
- jetrink 5y agoI loved my MiniDisk player, but the arbitrary roadblocks that Sony put up for how you were allowed to use the device and the poor quality of the management software were so infuriating that I vowed not to give Sony another cent for ten years. (I stuck to that promise too, even avoiding the temptation of the beautiful PRS-505 e-book reader. That turned out to be a good decision when the first Kindle came out shortly after.)
- mikepurvis 5y agoNot that the Kindle has especially been a model of embracing open standards and user flexibility. But at least it’s popular.
- Tostino 5y agoSometimes it's just about not being stuck with a paperweight.
- salamandersauce 5y agoThe PRS-505 supports ePub. Can't remember if that was after a firmware update or from the factory though. And even after the Sony ebook store closed down they let you transfer everything to Kobo. And you can still sideload ePubs on with Adobe Digital Editions. Early Kindles are going to lose a lot of functionality soon as 3G networks get shut down and they have no WiFi to fall back on.
- mikepurvis 5y agoOh yeah definitely, but the GP was specifically talking about the manufacturer throwing up arbitrary roadblocks.
- trollied 5y agoAnother discussion from yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27469891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27469891
- protomyth 5y agoSony's Entertainment Division probably had more to do with killing it than anything else. If the data drives were available with the music drives we probably would have seen some adoption given what was competing as external storage back then.
- rualca 5y agoI agree, minidiscs were a RW media format with a 140MB capacity that popped up in a time where 1.44MB floppy disks where still extensively used and the next-day thing we're CDRs/CDRW, both of which made it prohibitively time-consuming to write anything at all and were relatively fragile and inconvenient.
- protomyth 5y agoRemember Zip Drives and the click of death? MD would have been amazing especially if you could have just bought the same MD as the music.
- devoutsalsa 5y agoI had a 25-pin parallel port version of Zip Drive. It worked great, but it was SLOOOOOOWWWWWWW. Burnable CDs were more practical not too long after & then I only used it on computers w/o a CD-ROM.
- k__ 5y agoMiniDisk and ZIP drives where pretty cool. It was like a regular disk, but with >100x capacity and writable. Sad that their creators failed to commercalize them right.
- D13Fd 5y agoZIP was fairly successful until writable CDs came along. The biggest problem was the click of death. I remember collecting multiple drives in the late 1990’s trying to find one that didn’t have that issue. I guess they could have done a more open standard, but I’m not sure it would have helped them. I recall Superdisk was a slightly more open standard around the same time (maybe a little later) and it went no where.
- k__ 5y agoI fondly remember a friend of mine having an external ZIP drive, he carried around with a bag of disks. You could hook it up to any PC. But, CD burners got cheaper quickly and soon we wouldn't use it anymore.
- danieldk 5y agoI loved my ZIP drive. At home, we had a flaky 56k6 connection. Since my dad worked at the university where he had a 100MBit connection, I would sometimes tag along with him, bring a stack of ZIP disks, and download a Linux distribution and a bunch of other new stuff. Put this on a Zip disk, send it to your lawyer File me under "Funky" - Beastie Boys
- Svperstar 5y agoI got a ZIP drive like a year before I got a CD burner so it didn't have a very long lifespan. I wish I still had it so I could hook it up and see what I put on the discs.
- mattkevan 5y agoStill got a stack of Zip disks somewhere, full of Uni coursework and old design projects. The drive, in translucent plastic (to match the iMac), died long ago. Back in the day, 100mb was a breathtakingly large amount of storage - more than 80 floppy disks!
- FatalLogic 5y agoIs Betteridge's Law of Headlines always correct? This article provides the answer
- marban 5y agoSpent my first money from designing Web sites on a Becker in-car MD player along with ~20 original MD releases. Added a 6-disc autochanger a year later. Class act.
- ytch 5y agoI am doubt will blu-ray fall into the same problem. Producers add a lot limits for copy-protect (HDCP and others on UHD-BD). But will the popularity/convenience of streaming repeat how USB stick/MP3 replace MiniDisc?
- danieldk 5y agoI think convenience and price are the largest factors. Netflix costs less than a Blu-Ray for 'all you can eat' and you do not have to think about logistics (find/purchase a disk). Blu-rays do have copy protection, but AFAIK MakeMKV rips most Blu-rays without any issues.
- k__ 5y agoWell, you can still stream for free online.
- prvc 5y agoI had no idea MDs could be used for general data storage. Has anyone tried this format?
- salamandersauce 5y agoLGR has a YouTube video showing this drive off and it's use in detail. Seems kinda finicky.
- rhacker 5y agoIt's funny as I was growing up every few years there'd be tons of people ready to call it on the next betamax. It turns out ALL of it was. And it turns out that even owning a device that stores data at all is deprecated. Except for us devs (for now).
- cs2733 5y agoMid 2000s I had one and loved it. Used it with a good mic to do the audio side of video recordings for art school projects. This combo produced very good quality audio compared to your average handheld camera.
- analog31 5y agoI loved the idea of a high fidelity dropout free recording medium, hated the transfer process (analog). As a result, made a bunch of recordings and never did anything with them. Got a little tascam pocket recorder when it came out. Loved the transfer process (usb). Still did nothing with the recordings. Turns out you have to be a really good musician to make a tolerable recording.
- axiolite 5y agoSony hamstrung Minidisc by enforcing separation between audio and data. While the audio MDs became widely available and pretty cheap, the data MDs were rare and expensive. It's largely the same reason standalone CD recorders failed in the market, while PC CD-R drives were wildly successful. It was a fast and durable format. If they had come out the parallel-port or IDE based drives which wrote on the same audio MD blanks in the mid-90s, it could have displaced floppy disks and remained the standard until multi-gigabyte thumb drives came along.
- Daegalus 5y agoOddly, I just watched a rise and fall video yesterday (posted above somewhere already) on this that brought back memories. My dad oddly noticed this and got us into mini discs with an entertainment system that had it, and then a small walkman player that I used to record songs and such onto it. It was so cool for me as an pre-teen. (My dad got into it in 1997ish) I now want to just find a single MD to just keep as a memory, but they are costly to buy, even as a 5 pack.
- chairmanmow 5y agoThis about MiniDisc data discs, gosh I remember in 1996 I sold my Tascam 388 Reel-to-Reel 8 Track for a Tascam 564 4 Track minidisc. Terrible decision, although part of it was a reel to reel doesn't work great in a dorm room. 388 is a collector's item now, 564 is an anomaly.
- foxyv 5y agoMiniDisk could have been excellent and possibly even overtaken CDs in popularity. They were durable, had a small form factor, and were pretty cool looking. But then Sony decided to make it a proprietary audio format only and totally ruined the UX.