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Ricoh Corp. has long been making the magneto-optical drive mechanisms for bother manufacturers' MO drive systems. Ricoh's new magneto-optical drive, the 650MB HyperSpace PC/e (external) and PC/i (internal) and the 128MB Transporter PC/e and PC/i, mark the vendor's entry into the end-user market under its own name. In this review, we evaluated the HyperSpace PC/e.
To make the transition from OEM to user-ready products, Ricoh bundled the HyperSpace with an MO Launch Kit, consisting of a 16-bit UltraStor 14NR SCSI host adapter and driver software, cable and terminator block, CorelSCSI software, and manuals.
Earlier MO drives often used proprietary formats that prevented optical discs written in one brand of drive from being read by another. Ricoh's choice of Corel's SCSI software ensures that its drives will read and write the ISO standards for 5-1/4-and 3-1/2-inch media, as is used by Sony, IBM, Pinnacle, and other Corel-compatible solutions. Corel compatibility, with its use of the Adaptec ASPI specification, also means that you can use the HyperSpace drive with a wide variety of SCSI host adapters.
Magneto-optical drives commonly suffer from slow seek times. This is a result of trying to move the heavy laser diode as a part of the drive's head assembly. Ricoh has reduced the weight of the read/write head assembly in its HyperSpace and Transporter drives by keeping the laser diode element fixed and mounting only the objective lens and mirror prism portions of the optical system in the head assembly. Ricoh credits this technique in improving its drives' seek times.
Sony and other MO drives use a two-step seek process--first a "coarse seek," using external scales, then a...