Google isn’t helping a lot, probably because I don’t know the search terms. But on the local “freecycle” group, something is on offer called a:
and I have no idea what that means. It looks like some kind of old SCSI storage, but that’s all I’ve been able to figure out. There’s really no more information in the posting because of that. (You need to be a member to see the post.)
Does anybody know what that is?
An optical disc drive is another name for a CD / DVD drive. I’ve never seen it used another way.
CD/DVD drives are examples of optical drives, but I suspect the OP is tlking about something like an old one of these. The basic idea is still the same, but the data is supposed to more physically stable. The most obvious difference is the discs which look like this.
It’s pretty much useless to the average Joe.
It’s a device on which you can store drawings of Asian lovemaking techniques.
Oh, sorry, that would be a Kama Sutra Optical Disk Drive.
Anyway, the Corel Kurata was a proprietary mass-storage drive, using a hybrid optical/magnetic system that has since been made obsolete by rewritable DVDs and no-moving-parts miniature USB drives. The only reason to buy or acquire one (I’ve seen listings for about $40) is if you have a stack of 650MB Corel disks you have to transfer to something more modern.
On a similar note, I bought a Zip drive for my girlfriend a while back, because some of her clients still use them and send her projects on the old 100MB cartridges. Most of them have grudgingly moved over to writable CDs and DVDs, though, and the drive gets less and less use. I expect her to soon check her stack of old cartridges, transfer anything of use to CD, and toss the whole kit in a box for the Salvation Army.
Ah! Thanks all. The listing says it’s going to get thrown out if nobody takes it, so I might just go pick it up, if only to take a look at it. It’s SCSI, I think, so I really can’t plug it in to anything that I’ve got. (Yet!)
Well, if you get it working, be sure to send us lots of RLE images showing how the install went. That’d be boss.
