This section describes what hardware and software you need to have in order to use an MO drive.
Hardware Requirements
You need a SCSI controller in order to use a SCSI drive.
There are MO drives available which use the IDE/ATAPI interface, for example Fujitsu's MCA3064AP 640MB drive. It is probably possible to use these with an A1200 or A4000's built-in IDE controller in conjunction with software like "IDEfix", but I have not tried this.
Software Requirements
No special software is needed.
For using media with a sector size other than 512 bytes, for example 640MB 3½" disks, you will need to use FastFileSystem 40.1 or higher, which is available as part of AmigaOS 3.1.
FFS 40.1 is compatible with Kickstarts 1.2 & 1.3, so it is probably possible to use a 640 MB 3½" MO disk under even these old operating systems. I have not tested this. It should definitely be possible to use 512-bytes-per-sector MO media with these old OS versions and almost any FFS version.
You can download the latest beta version of the FastFileSystem from the Amiga
Inc. web site at:
I am currently using FFS 43.20 with my 640MB MO drive. The beta FFS versions seem to require at least OS 3.1. Alternatively, you can use another filesystem such as SFS or PFS2. If using disks with a sector size other than 512 bytes, make sure that whichever filesystem you use supports the correct sector size! PFS2 in particular does not officially support sector sizes greater than 1024 bytes.
If you want to use HDToolBox to create RDBs on your MO disks, be aware that HDToolBox only allows RDBs to be installed on direct access devices, i.e. hard disks. See the Drive Settings (DIP switches) section for more information on the two selectable device types. I have created a patch for HDToolBox to allow you to use HDToolBox with MO drives that are set to "optical memory device" mode.
For information on reading and writing PC and Macintosh-formatted MO disks and using the drive under ShapeShifter, see the Cross-Platform Access section, and also the example mount files.
SCSI utility programs such as SCSIUtil can be used to eject the disk, instead of having to press the Eject button on the drive. You can prevent and allow manual disk ejection with the same program.
I have not tried using a large capacity 5¼" MO drive or disks with my Amiga. However, all current sizes are not likely to be a problem. Remember that 5¼" disks are double-sided, and you turn over the disk to access the other half capacity. So with a 5.2GB MO disk, each side holds 2.6GB of data. There are none of the problems associated with hard disks larger than 4GB. Some programs including HDToolBox may get confused and report negative amounts of space free, but this should be harmless, and happens with any drive/partition over 2GB.
For use with alternative operating systems such as NetBSD, you may need to use media with 512-byte sectors if the OS only supports this sector size. You may not be able to use 640MB 3½" MO disks for example, since they have 2048-byte sectors. You can use 540MB disks instead.