Chinon America, Inc.
615 Hawaii Avenue
Torrance, CA 90503
800-441-0222
$889
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The Chinon MOX-300/100 is a magneto optical drive storing 128 mb on sturdy, reliable cartridges. The 128 mb capacity places the Chinon directly on the sweet spot for use at individual workstations for specific backups, program archiving and large file transfers. The $889 price also puts it square on the sweet spot of afordability for an individual user or small office.
A drive this size is ideal for backing up system files and important data. Realistically there's not much need to backup your entire Windows directory or most program files. If the worst happens and you're forced to actually use your backup files what are the really important things you hope will be on that backup? Data first. Your customer database, your financial spreadsheets, your customer's CAD or graphics files will come first. Too often these types of data cannot be replaced or easily recreated. The next thing most users will want is to be able to restore their system to the same condition it was in before disaster struck—your backups of WIN.INI, SYSTEM.INI, CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC.BAT and other important .INI files are going to be the only way you'll ever come close to getting your system back to normal. All these types of files will fit on one or at most two Chinon cartridges. AutoCAD, CorelDRAW!, PageMaker, MS Office, all can be reinstalled from the program floppies or CDs. Having a Chinon constantly hooked up to your system means you can easily drag and drop a few files from your hard drive to your Chinon whenever the fear strikes you. The feeling of security instilled by convenient, fast, almost real time data backup is not much more than a luxury for most business users. For mission critical workstations with important data it is a necessity. The speed and convenience of instant backup provided by the Chinon beats the ham fisted approach of tape drives hands down making tape drive technology seem antediluvian by comparison.
The Chinon MOX drive is about the same as having another hard drive you can pop out and put in your pocket. 42 millisecond seek time, 640 Kbs sustained data transfer rate, and SCSI interface make the Chinon MOX seem only slightly slower than a fast hard drive. If you already have a SCSI device installed you can daisy chain off of it making installing a Chinon MOX one of the easiest hardware installs you'll ever tackle. An external unit can be installed almost as easily as plugging in a printer or monitor.
Should I include a long list of features and specifications? I wish I could just to impress you but the facts are, this is a simple device that works well and is simple to operate as a floppy drive. It features a semiconductor laser, has 1 in 1,000,000,000,000 bit error rate, has a built in 256k buffer and weighs about 3 lbs. That's a lot more than I've ever needed to know about my floppy drives and it's more than you need to know about Chinon MOX. If you're looking for the security of quick and easy backups, if you need to transfer large data files to other users or if you just need someplace to keep all those fonts or clipart you've been accumulating the Chinon MOX is the tool you need for the job.
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