Fujitsu Answers The Call For Storage

The drive is ideal for backup, and its technology caters to companies that need tolerant and reliable removable storage. It is backward-compatible and can read and write to all previous 3.5-inch MO media. The cross-platform solution also has unlimited rewrite capability and offers a data-transfer rate of up to 8 Mbytes per second.

"One thing we've done with MO is to replace tape drives as a backup solution," said Jay Franz, sales and marketing director at Bering Technology, a San Jose, Calif.-based solution provider and systems builder specializing in mass storage.

The CRN Test Center installed the MCJ3230AP IDE MO drive on a 1.4GHz AMD Athlon system with 256 Mbytes of DDR RAM. The device was installed easily into an open bay and required no extraordinary installation procedures. Running on Windows XP, the drive was picked up instantly without any additional drivers.

The device had no difficulties reading MO media, which are inserted in the drive using an included cartridge. The drive handled recording, reading and rerecording without any snags.

Implementing an MO drive rather than an alternate backup solution such as a CD or DVD-RW has some distinct advantages, Test Center engineers said.

For one, installing an MO drive doesn't require any additional software or drivers. Second, when adding a rewritable CD or DVD drive, burn software is needed to write to the CD or DVD. And when compared with tape-backup drives, MO drives are more affordable and reliable. Also, archival life is somewhat longer and more reliable on MO drives than on discs, the engineers said.

PRODUCT: 2.3-Gbyte MO drive
PRICE: $349
DISTRIBUTORS: Arrow, Avnet, Ingram Micro, Microland, Tech Data
INTEGRATORS: No qualified integrators yet
COMPANY: Fujitsu Computer Products of America
PHONE: (800) 626-4686