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From: nvi@mace.cc.purdue.edu (Charles C. Allen)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Extremely Fast Filesystems
Message-ID: <5286@mace.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: 8 Aug 90 01:36:50 GMT
References: <5539@darkstar.ucsc.edu> <13285@yunexus.YorkU.CA> <30728@super.ORG> <13667@cbmvax.commodore.com>
Organization: Purdue University
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> 	I submit that your situation is something of an unusual case, and is
> likely to remain unusual for at least a decade, perhaps 2.  Few machines
> (percentage-wise) even have 4 GB of storage, let alone files larger that 4GB
> (I've never even seen a file larger than 100MB, even on mainframes).

Until recently, the "standard" media for transporting files has been
9-track 6250 tape, which holds around 200M.  Until recently, all our
data files were less than 200M (hmm... I hope you see the
correlation).  Now that we have some 8mm tape drives, we routinely
have 400M files.  We'd have bigger ones, but all our disks are little
SCSI 600-700M thingies (access time is not very critical), and we
can't easily have a single file span volumes.  This is for high energy
physics data analysis.

Charles Allen			Internet: cca@newton.physics.purdue.edu
Department of Physics			  nvi@mace.cc.purdue.edu
Purdue University		HEPnet:   purdnu::allen, fnal::cca
West Lafayette, IN  47907	talknet:  317/494-9776