Magneto optical disc media to buy online, MO

4mm And 8mm Dat Cartridges cheap prices from DVD-and-Media.com

Optical 4mm and 8mm dat cartridges

Please select your Optical dat cartridge model...... 3.5 inch Magneto Optical 5.25 inch rewritable magneto optical Direct Overwrite

MO, magneto optical media disc products from Verbatim and Maxell

As their name suggests, magneto-optical, or MO discs record data through the use of both light and magnetism. A laser first heats the surface of the disc to a high temperature, and then data is recorded by changing the magnetic characteristics of tiny areas on the disc. Though they resemble floppy disks and hard disks in their use of magnetism, the magnetic characteristics of MO discs cannot be changed unless they are heated, which means they are not easily affected by the magnetic fields of TVs or magnets. MO discs can not only store large volumes of data, but are also reliable, since data is read and written using the non-contact method of laser beams, removing the risk of scratching.

CD-Magneto Optical (CD-MO) is a compact disc format that uses magnetic fields for data storage. Defined by Philips and Sony in their 1990 Recordable CD Standard, informally known as the Orange Book), CD-MO discs can, at least theoretically, be rewritten an unlimited number of times.
CD-MO discs are constructed of an alloy of terbium ferrite and cobalt. The reading of an MO disc is based on the Kerr effect. In the Kerr effect, linear, polarized light is deflected when it is influenced by a magnetic field, and the plane of polarization is twisted. The MO method changes the magnetic characteristics of tiny areas on the disk's surface so that the reading laser beam is reflected differently on altered areas than on unaltered areas.

When writing to the disc, a laser beam is focused on an extremely small spot, and the alloy is heated to a specific temperature (called the Curie point) sufficient to cause the ferromagnetic properties of the aligned elementary particles to be lost. An electromagnet is positioned on the other side of the disc, changing the polarity of the particles, whose differences will be encoded as binary data for storage. Like other optical media, such as DVD and other CD formats, CD-MO is read by a laser beam, which makes it more reliable than a hard disk or a floppy disk. However, a strong magnetic field can corrupt the stored data.