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| N3000 NeXT Optical Drive | 256MB Optical Drive (formatted) NeXT interface using Optical Storage Processor 92ms average seek time 18ms average seek time within 3MB range 4.6MB/sec raw burst tansfer rate 800KB/sec raw sustained transfer rate Magneto-optical technology Read/write/erasable and removable media Primary disk and/or backup. Available disks come in single and double sided flavors. Carrying 256 or 512MB per disk or 256M per side. Cost was between $50 and $100/disk. An important note: ONLY 25Mhz 68030 and 68040 cubes have the space and required interface connector to be able to use the NeXT Optical Drive. | ||||
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. 1998.10 1998-89 1998-89 |
One Removable disk is shown on the left. Some History NeXT was the first computer manufacturer to include a Magneto-optical drive as standard equipment. In fact in conjunction with Canon, pushed the burgeoning technolgy forward into a shipping product. Early reports indicated that the Optical Drive was too slow to be used completely as a system drive including swap. Shortly thereafter a 40M Quantum swap disk was added to the default NeXT Computer Configuration to improve responsiveness. Also since the Optical drive was the system disk it effectively could not be removed. An dual Optical Drive configuration was made available. I believe the additional drive cost $1995. Edu cost $1500. It was discovered that many of the Optical Drives were failing due to incredible amounts of dust that would have a tendancy to be sucked into the front of the drive. The dust reduced airflow and increased the operating temperature - as well as coating the optics. To address this problem NeXT encouraged all owners to reverse the fan orientation to cause air to flow from the back to the front of the case. Also NeXT sold a Optical Drive Filter shown on the left to reduce the amount of dust entering the drive. | |||
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