The magneto optical drive is a high capacity, optical storage device that is primarily used to store audio and video clips and as an archive device. The drive is not fast enough to play full screen video directly from an optical disk, but is fast enough to play smaller video clips such as 160x120, 320x240, and audio clips.

The drive supports standard 5.25 inch optical media with capacity up to 1.3G. It also supports lower capacity 650M disks. Disks can be borrowed for temporary use. To borrow a disk, please contact the GRA at heagy@csgrad.cs.vt.edu.

The drive is very easy to use. Be sure the drive is on and insert a disk. The disks are double sided and must be turned over to access each side and utilize the full capacity of the disk. If the disk is formatted, after several seconds an icon will appear on the desktop. If the disk is not formatted, no icon will appear. In this case, the disk format utility is called Spot-On and is located in the UTILITIES menu of the Apple pull-down menu. Run Spot-On and select SCSI device 5. Then select Easy Setup, then Delete Partition. It takes about 30 minutes to format one side of a 650M disk. When finished, eject the disk, flip it over and format side B. After this, the disk is ready to use. Simply drag and drop files on this drive as you would any other drive.