Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!samsung!rex!ames!sgi!shinobu!odin!anchor!olson
From: olson@anchor.esd.sgi.com (Dave Olson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: Re: Optical disk jukebox
Message-ID: <1991Jan29.051029.5560@odin.corp.sgi.com>
Date: 29 Jan 91 05:10:29 GMT
References: <9101282258.AA11999@koko.pdi.com>
Sender: news@odin.corp.sgi.com (Net News)
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.  Mountain View, CA
Lines: 33

In <9101282258.AA11999@koko.pdi.com> shoshana@pdi.UUCP (Shoshana Abrass) writes:
|   We're thinking of buying an optical disk 'jukebox' for our sgi's. So far
|   we've only found one vendor that has an sgi driver: Introl, which sells
|   two types of 10-disk systems, one which uses the Ricoh drive and one
|   which uses the Maxtor/Tahiti drive.
| 
|   Does anyone have any experience with
| 	1. The Tahiti r/w optical drive?
| 	2. Introl's jukebox, either on an sgi or another unix machine?
| 	3. Another company that has a jukebox with an sgi driver?

No comments on the jukebox itself, but the Maxtor Tahiti is one of
the faster MO drives out there (at least on SGI systems).  We
measured about 490 Kbytes/sec sustainable on filesystem reads, and
about 200 Kbytes/sec on writes (erase before write slows things
down).   It also as fairly fast access time (35 ms average, if I
remember correctly).  The drive itself (again, not jukeboxes)
is software supported in 3.3, and we have an ongoing arrangement with
Maxoptix/Storage Dimensions where they support the hardware and we
support the software.

Just be REAL careful to be sure they get adequate (and cool enough)
airflow, or you have an expensive repair.  This is true of most of
the current high performance MO drives.  Rumors are that future
versions will be more heat tolerant.  That said, they seem to be
pretty reliable.

I'm afraid I don't remember anything about the Ricoh drives.
--

	Dave Olson

Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.