Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!kitchel From: kitchel@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Sid Kitchel) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Extremely Fast Filesystems Message-ID: <53864@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> Date: 9 Aug 90 15:45:45 GMT References: <5539@darkstar.ucsc.edu> <13285@yunexus.YorkU.CA> <30728@super.ORG> <13667@cbmvax.commodore.com> <5286@mace.cc.purdue.edu> <14923@cgl.ucsf.EDU> Organization: Indiana University, Bloomington Lines: 33 In article <5286@mace.cc.purdue.edu> nvi@mace.cc.purdue.edu (Charles C. Allen) writes: |> 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. Ah, the joy of isolation at Purdue!! Here at Indiana University we have something called Sociology. Some sociologists have developed the nasty habit of investigating the U.S. Census data. Currently I'm working with a group studying a fairly restricted set of county data from the 1970 Census that is 6 tapes long. These are 9-track 6250 bpi tapes. The Census bureau makes standard extracts each census year that are often 20 to 30 tapes long. Yes, Virginia, big files do exist! And our best guess is that some of them will only get bigger. Now if VMS only had tape handling... --Sid -- Sid Kitchel...............WARNING: allergic to smileys and hearts.... Computer Science Dept. kitchel@cs.indiana.edu Indiana University kitchel@iubacs.BITNET Bloomington, Indiana 47405-4101........................(812)855-9226