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From: barry@pico.math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: 20 Meg Floppies
Message-ID: <1991May5.015304.13725@math.ucla.edu>
Date: 5 May 91 01:53:04 GMT
References: <1991May3.103620.14757@gmuvax2.gmu.edu> <484@heaven.woodside.ca.us> <1991May4.232000.15816@gmuvax2.gmu.edu> <1991May4.233348.16173@gmuvax2.gmu.edu>
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Organization: UCLA Dept. of Math, UCLA Inst. for Fusion and Plasma Research
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The ideal solution is to have a drive that accepts disks with 
a range of capacities.

As it is, this is not the case: floppy drives accept 0.7, 1.4 and 
2.8 MB---all O(1MB), on the small side. The optical drive accepts 256MB and 
512MB (2-sided), all O(1GB), on the big side. 

What is needed is a drive that could take these sized disks,
and intermediate sized as well. My experience with NeXT is that
usually I usually deal with stuff in chunks of  5MB, occasionaly 20MB,
and 100MB for backups and offline archives (all of comp.unix, etc).

My dream drive would accept disks with sizes:
4MB 16MB 64MB 256MB, priced accordingly. 
With this scheme, you would never have to use more that 3 disks
(just jump to the larger size otherwise), and probably 1 would always
be enough (with compression). I'd expect the prices to go like
$10, $25, $50, $100 (and dropping with time).

How to make such a drive? starting with floppies and working up
probably can't get beyond 50MB or so, and even that will take much 
development.

Instead, why not start from the existing optical drives and
work _down_? That is, why can't they just make _smaller_ disks
for the current optical drive (or its succesor, which may
take 3.5 inch disks).

Probably the answer is that its creators didn't envision
it as a replacement for floppies---they probably thought
of it as the primary hard drive, which we now know to be a mistake.


--
Barry Merriman
UCLA Dept. of Math
UCLA Inst. for Fusion and Plasma Research
barry@math.ucla.edu (Internet)