Floppy/Optical disk identification

[Mark R]

I found a whole bunch of these at work during a tidy up.

Any idea what they are and what the specs are?

They've got a glass disk platter inside, with etched sectors on it.

 

[razel]

You got really small hands.

I see to the right of there what looks like it's slide cover with some writing Verbatim and 100MB maybe?

 

[VirtualLarry]

WORM drive disk?

 

[ericloewe]

The only similar thing I can remember would be some sort of Laserdisc

 

[m.alkhalel]

I don't think it's a laserdisc, most likely a crvdisc or an ancient floppydisc?

 

[bbhaag]

I have no idea but it's pretty wild looking. haha I love stumbling across old school tech like that. To bad you have no way of knowing what is stored on them.

 

[tcsenter]

What's on the other side?

 

[corkyg]

Strange that there is no nomenclature plate anywhere on the device. ??? As I recall, the earliest floppy drive was for an 8-in disk. This looks like 16 or so.

 

[jimmybgood9]

That disk looks like the disks made for the Plasmon 8000 series 12 inch TrueWORM autoload jukeboxes. Unalterable, minimum data life = 100 years.

This disk is probably for an older, lower capacity drive.

Do you work in a bank or for a govmint regulatory agency?

 

[Elixer]

Yeah, looks like a plasmon WORM disk.

 

[Mark R]

I found some new ones in boxes. They are Plasmon LaserDrive media.

Don't know whether it's WORM or not. The people at work who used to use them don't know either.

I've edited up a short video showing me taking one apart to see what's in it:
Video

I work at a hospital. The disks were archive media for an old MRI scanner installed in 1985. It came with one of these plasmon drives, and they kept a backup copy of the files on them (the main "copy" was a printout of the images on X-ray film; but given the cost of an MRI scan, and the tendency of X-ray images to get lost or damaged, the hospital decided to save the digital data on computer disk).

When the scanner was decommissioned in 1992, the disks were kept in case they were ever needed again. However, the drive was sold with the scanner, so if data had been required to have been retrieved from disk, it would not have been possible without a massive effort in either procuring a new drive or contracting a data recovery firm to do it.

Subsequently, the disks were put into deep storage, as it was easier to store them rather than pay an approved data destruction company to come on-site and perform witnessed and certified shredding. (Old X-ray films contained substantial silver, so the film destruction company actually paid the hospital to destroy and recycle the old film - this didn't work with computer disks).

I found them while clearing out an old storeroom, as I needed to move some computers (intersting things like SGI Indys and O2s, Sparcstations, etc.), out of the way to make room for some new ones. Like the old disks, it's likely the old computers will just sit in the storeroom for the next 20 years, because it's cheaper than securely disposing of them.

 

[Elixer]

I found them while clearing out an old storeroom, as I needed to move some computers (intersting things like SGI Indys and O2s, Sparcstations, etc.), out of the way to make room for some new ones. Like the old disks, it's likely the old computers will just sit in the storeroom for the next 20 years, because it's cheaper than securely disposing of them.

Interesting job you got there... do those indys & sparcs still work ?
I know, you can get them to buy you a ticket to fly to Hawaii, rent a chopper, then hover over one of the active volcanoes, and drop the stuff that needs to be destroyed.

 

[bryanl]

In general, how is data read from obsolete media when the original drive isn't available? Do some data recovery companies maintain old drives just for that purpose, or are there special purpose machines that can read many media?

 

[Mark R]

In general, how is data read from obsolete media when the original drive isn't available? Do some data recovery companies maintain old drives just for that purpose, or are there special purpose machines that can read many media?

There are specialist data recovery companies that maintain a collection of old drives and appropriate controllers/computers for them. There are also some consultants who keep a directory of firms which offer this and what equipment they have, so can point people in the right direction.

Not every company may have every type of drive, or there may be issues with specific media/drive combinations being particular about individual differences; this has been a particular problem with tape backup systems, if one drive is at the edge of tolerance in one way, and another drive is at the edge of tolerance in the other direction, sometimes, tapes written in one might fail to read in the other. The problem would be worse if one of the drives was actually out of spec, but still working.

A technique frequently recommended is that a whole bunch of drives be bought, and fully tested with media written on all the others, that the data could be reliably read. Several drives should then be placed in a secure off-site location with the media, so that in the event of disaster, known working drives are available with the data. As part of routine backup testing, the spare drives should be tested for compatibility with newly recorded media, with replacement of the drives, or change of backup strategy if compatibility has been lost (e.g. because the drives have gone out of alignment).

A lot of drives are designed with backwards compatibility in mind. e.g. blu-ray drives will read dvdr(w) and cdr(w) discs. Similarly, a lot of these optical drives went through several generations in the same form-factor. Typically, the later models (e.g. 5.2 GB) were capable of reading (if not writing) older discs (e.g. 600 MB). That said, experience at a lot of sites was that this was flaky at best. Where I'd worked before, they kept a stack of old 1.2 GB drives for their 600 and 1.2 GB disc archives. However, the drive population was dwindling and they were periodically turning to eBay or having a resident geek strip the drives down and try to service them.