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Need a drive for Maxtor OC-800 Optical Disk cartridges

WildcatMatt

WildcatMatt

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Wilmington, Delaware
I four old Maxtor OC-800 Optical Disk cartridges in my possession. The label says they're good for 786MB of storage.

These particular disks were originally used in an Ampex Electronic Still-Store and contain TV graphics from the early '90s.

I would like very much to try and retrieve the data on them, but I'm not having much luck finding any information on what drive models might be capable of reading them. Based on the one page I found that references the format (Optical Disks) mentions they also came in 110MB and 600MB variants and appear to be a separate track from other WORM/MO tech.

Does anyone know anything about these beasts?
 
Sounds like early WORM optical (not MO) technology. I posted some time ago about my Panasonic LF-5000 WORM drive that uses LM-D501 discs. This really is write once technology--unlike later WORM MO stuff that allows rewriting. If you think about it, maintaining a read-write filesystem on one is an interesting mental exercise, since you can only write new sectors and not erase or overwrite the old ones. I had to reverse-engineer the filesystem. The ironic thing is that one of the discs was a backup of system files and contained the filesystem driver.

The Panasonic discs are 470MB/side. I've still got a stack of new ones in original shrink wrap.

You might have better luck searching under the Maxoptix branding, rather than Maxtor (the former was a Maxtor spinoff).
 
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Also check for Ricoh drives since the Storage Dimensions/Maxoptix WORM drives were Ricoh drives. Maxtor got an exclusive license for the US but that still leaves a lot of the world getting the same drive under the Ricoh branding.

Unfortunately, the only reference I have for Ricoh drives does not show a model with the 786 MB capacity that Maxtor lists.
 
I've not seen an OD hub like the one in the OC-800; I think the RXT-800S and -800HS drives are likely your only choices. Lucky for you it's got an embedded controller (is a SCSI device) and you're not going to have the same problem as the IBM 3363 and NeXT MO have, where you need a matching controller to make sense of the low level medium format. Even if you can't interpret the filesystem, you should at least be able to get a block copy of your media once you find a suitable drive.
 
eswan said:
Maxtor RXT-800S (full height) or HS (half height). Media is only spec'ed for a 10 year archival life. [...]
800MB sounds like an oddball capacity. I'm more familiar with the 650/1.2/2.4 MO drives.
Click to expand...
bear said:
I've not seen an OD hub like the one in the OC-800; I think the RXT-800S and -800HS drives are likely your only choices. [...] Even if you can't interpret the filesystem, you should at least be able to get a block copy of your media once you find a suitable drive.
Click to expand...

Thanks so much for the quick identification! I managed to find one on eBay so we'll see how things go.

If they read at all my plan is to ddrescue them and work out the filesystem later.
 
As an update...

The drive, which was sold as "untested", arrived on Thursday and unfortunately (but not wholly unexpectedly) doesn't (completely) work. Linux finds the drive on the SCSI bus, correctly identifies it, and based on the row of status LEDs inside the drive is talking with the electronics, but the laser assembly never moves beyond an initial startup seek and the disk activity LED never flickers, returning a "no medium" error.

It's got over a dozen jumpers scattered all over the logic boards so there could be a bad component somewhere or it could just be a missing or incorrect jumper. A pity the closest thing to documentation I've found is someone's screenlogging of a trawl through Maxtor's BBS from 1991 showing there was a ZIP file with some data available once upon a time.

I'll follow up if I learn anything more, but if anyone has any suggestions I'm all ears...
 
When the Panasonic arrived it was in similar condition. The laser head and guide rails being cleaned improved things a bit, but I was unable to get a complete read of a disc (note that "blank" sectors register as errors--it isn't like imaging a hard disk). Bit the bullet and started taking things apart--I discovered that the small sprint that holds the drive door shut had come off and landed on the very strong magnet core for the positioner. Put the spring back where it belonged and the thing appears to be completely functional.

I was worried that the laser head may have been bad (where to find another one of those?), but I lucked out.

The thing to get used to is that these early optical drives can be very slow--about as fast as a floppy drive.
 
Another update.

I was able to get another unit from the same seller. This one was missing a pair of resistor packs which I was able to swap from the other unit.

The second unit detects the presence of a disk, spins up and attempts to seek but finds no data. Using ddrescue only finds bad blocks and cleaning the laser didn't help. The one thing I've learned about the first drive is that the motor gives the disk a spin at insertion and then stops, which explains the odd failure state.

I suppose it's possible that the data on the disks has simply been lost to time since they're 20 years old now but maybe I need to play more with the ddrescue settings.
 
Remember that on these old write-only opticals, (not MO), sectors can either be used or unused. Trying to read an unused sector will produce an error. In my case, the organization was such that "used" sectors were scattered throughout the disc, interspersed with unused ones. It was a real chore figuring out the filesystem structure. That being said, if you don't find a used sector within, say, the first 100, you may well have problems.

Be sure that you also specify the sector size--these things don't usually have 512 byte sectors.
 
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