Magneto Optical (MO) disks?

[howie-doing]

I have searched all over, including this forum, but cannot determine whether Eraser would be appropriate for securely erasing Magneto Optical (MO) disks. The question is, will using Eraser make erasing such a disk more secure, or will it just expend more time to do what a normal format would do.

I realize MO disks and drives are somewhat like ancient history these days, but back in me mid-90s, with a battle over removable, reusable media drives in the 100-250MB capacity, I chose an Olympus SYS.230 SCSI drive with 230MB magneto optical cartridges as a personal "best choice" solution. Now it seems absurd that we were spending $300 for a removable drive with maximum capacity of 230MB media, but it was a reliable choice over the 100MB iOmega Zip drives of the time.

Anyway, bottom line: Is their any actual utility in me using Eraser to erase my old MO disks? (The disks still available for purchase, Amazon costs $10-20 per disk.)

Thanks,
Howie

 

[DavidHB]

I'm not sure that Joel has even tested this ...

My instinct is that, if the low-level implementation of the file structure gives problems, these will tend to arise more with individual file/folder erasures than with wiping free space. Try it and see; you can use a file recovery program such as Recuva to see if anything is recoverable.

I seem to recall that these disks allow only a limited number of read/write cycles. If that is true, it could be an issue in some circumstances.

David