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LGR Oddware - Sony MDH-10 MiniDisc Data Drive (Patreon)

Published:
2018-08-13 20:31:36
Edited:
2018-08-14 14:17:27
Imported:
2021-03

Content

EDIT: For some dumb reason YouTube decided to only show this in 360p... new version has been uploaded, HD resolutions should be working now!

Here's one I've been wanting to cover for years, finally all came together! This is the Sony MDH-10 MD Data drive for personal computers. Yep, they had MiniDisc storage a decade before formats like Hi-MD came along in the 2000s!

Well, it mostly came together. A little bummed that even after several units and lots of hardware/software configurations I was never able to get the data retrieval working 100%. Still, I think after the past few months of screwing with MDH-10s, and who knows how many hours of off-camera troubleshooting, it came together all right enough for this video.

Hope you enjoy!

Files

LGR Oddware - MiniDisc Data Storage: Sony MDH-10

Comments

Anonymous

You know your the early viewer when YouTube only shows 360p Good video!

Anonymous

Another awesome episode! I wonder if Neo used one of these in the Matrix...

LazyGameReviews
>>14639224

Oddly enough, Neo used "TDK Studio" audio MiniDiscs in The Matrix, which of course didn't store computer data. But they sure looked cool!

Bastien Nocera

Period appropriate encoding.

Lindsay Michelle

Wow, that sounds exactly like (the exact opposite of) DMX! It's like you didn't try at all to match the song ;) And man, I guess I was right to say "ouch" when I heard the MSRP for that MiniDisc drive, since people back then thought it was too expensive, too!

Anonymous

Oh my eye! Standard Def! LOL just joking, yeah sometimes youtube can take awhile and as a minidisc collector I am glad you did this video!

Anonymous

Yet another very interesting video. Thanks Clint, btw love the new hair do, very dapper.

Anonymous

Hmmm.... still only available in 360p. It's 5:26 PM CDT where I live and from the time stamps on the various comments it looks like this post as been available on Patreon for at least 2 hours. Who knows... maybe the old YT staff had a few too many at the company picnic this past weekend. LOL!!!

avfusion

Hey, this is a thing I know a bit about under the hood. So the being unable to read from the disc was actually due to the copy protection of the disk. That file-system that it must be formatted with translates to gibberish to the win32/win16 command program. The reason for this is because the driver sets up a layer in between Windows and the drive that checks the data going in and out of the disk, again, as a copy protection scheme. The command processor is simple enough that it can run from any valid data location, but when you run it directly from the disk, Windows can successfully read the resource files for icons, sizes, titles, etc. but it can't read the data payload. In fact, the disk itself has a header section that signals to the MD layer how to treat the disk. Writables and rewritables signal that they're valid mediums to read/write to, a guid that identifies the disk, and each file has a finalized track-block segment at the end that identifies its "owning" disk. I'm assuming this would be used for the "gaming" disks as they would have MD segments on disk that could be marked read-only, which on insert would signal to the protection/driver layer to allow read and execution, but not transfer, which caused it to track where data would be unpacked in memory so as to prevent other applications from potentially dumping it (causing an application or system crash). And of course, as you saw with the audio, that required a special app to play. The player itself streams the audio during playback, not as data in the traditional sense, but more in a Redbook fashion but with Sony's formats all over it to prevent copying. Basically, this thing was one of Sony's horrible DRM-encrusted formats that thankfully didn't take off. We needed less of those in the world.

avfusion
>>14641947

I also think the stupid slow-down was caused by the disk having to break down the large files into blocks, treating them as seperate MD-filesystem objects then finalizing each section to the end. So each time it writes one portion of the file, it has to seek to the end and write the protection information on the backporch of the disk before returning back to write the next portion of the file. AFAIK different MD data drives do this differently, so not all have this dumb slowdown or seeking problem and are a bit smarter about it.

Anonymous

Ooooh! I love the Oddware series, tho' I'll wait. Need to have mah LGR stuffz in the highest possible quality! :)

Akselmo

I wonder if these MD discs are somewhat related to PSP's UMD discs?

LazyGameReviews
>>14642882

Other than both being small disc formats developed by Sony, I'm not aware of any major relation between the two on a technical level.

LazyGameReviews
>>14639955

Indeed, the pricing was absolutely prohibitive for the intended market. Have no idea what Sony was thinking.

Anonymous

Used to have a tiny portable minidisc audio player and a recording deck that hooked into a Sony bookshelf speaker mini-hifi with an optical port from CD. It was a pretty great combo. I never could label tracks, but it recorded with the track splits and that was enough for me. Never bought album disks for that reason.

Anonymous

The previous owner of that mixtape disk must’ve been a big fan of the movie 8 Mile

Joon Choi

Classic Sony - awesome engineering, questionable UX decisions, insistence on proprietary connectors and formats for everything, and nonsensical pricing / go to market strategy. Makes me think the success of the PSX was probably entirely luck (I.e. capitalizing on Nintendo’s bad decisions and eroded good will with third party publishers).

Anonymous

Two headphone jacks.. you can tell this wasn't designed by Apple.

Anonymous
>>14645883

Sony used them all up in the 1990s and now there are none left for our iPhones. :(

Carey Brown

OMG!! I love the copyright cover up tune!!! I'm a bit surprised its having issues though. Do you have another disk to try with?

Anonymous

Will we ever run out of weird over-engineered Sony "things" that ended up going nowhere?

Elizabeth Sullivan-Burton

Hooray, an LGR oddware! I like all your episodes but Oddware is definitely my favorite. I think they're interesting because they're the might-have-beens--things that could have been big or seemed big for a while but then turned out to be a business cul-de-sac.

LazyGameReviews
>>14651692

Seemingly not! Every one of their weird things I talk about ends up uncovering another half dozen obscure items they made, heh

LazyGameReviews
>>14649664

Yep, as mentioned I tried it with the multiple discs I had. Same issue with each one of 'em sadly

Robert Butler

This is super fascinating, though!

Anonymous

Oddware is my absolute favorite 😊

Anonymous

This video got me thinking about just how many different types of media sony has come up with. There are these two mini discs then in just their game systems they have, the memory sticks psps use, the M2 cards that psp gos use, that other variation that the ps vita uses, those umd discs that psp games and media came on... Sony made a lot of media formats!

Anonymous

Oh I love Minidisc, but they do like to break. I always wanted an MD player that could do data, because allegedly you could pretty much just drop songs straight onto it from within Windows - however you had to rip everything to ATRAC so it could be copied straight on, but the MD player just treated it as a data disk and played the files. Otherwise it would play standard MD. Love to get my hands on one, just for funsies.

Anonymous

Funny - while everyone was going crazy in the late 90s about the faster and faster CD-ROM, CD-RW, CD+RW drives, I kept to my TEAC 16x drive.... Why you may ask? because .... the faster you write to a CD-ROM, the less time the laser spends on the disc and the more prone to errors (scratches, etc..) I found that 16x was the best compromise between speed and reliability, especially when making my own music compilation cd's for my car stereo or similar, where discs written by faster drives often didn't work or only worked a few times...