Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!umd5!brl-adm!adm!rbj@icst-cmr.arpa From: rbj@icst-cmr.arpa (Root Boy Jim) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: WORM drives anyone ? Message-ID: <13281@brl-adm.ARPA> Date: 4 May 88 19:48:30 GMT Sender: news@brl-adm.ARPA Lines: 35 Since you can buy a SCSI drive for $4000 and a SCSI controller for $1500 or less, I assume a major bottleneck is the non-trivial software interface, i.e. how to make a write-once device useful. Does anyone have any thoughts as to the "proper" approach to allow "transparent" filesystem- like access, especially under UNIX ? It seems to me that a fileserver daemon could be written to emulate a UNIX filesystem and hide the inherent issues of the WORM... There are several approaches to WORMS. The most obvious is tape emulation, and some WORM drives actually plug into tape controllers and emulate them. Disk emulation is harder. You can either keep the index on a real disk, or write it out to create a permanent frozen read-only file system. This usually requires a specialized driver, as well as utilities to squeeze good data from one drive onto another. Yet another approach is taken by Epoch Systems in Marlborough, Mass. They gave us a presentation and told us not to say anything, so I won't say anything else except to give their phone number, which is (617) 481-3717, and to say that I was relatively impressed. They should announce soon, and will probably visit your site and give their pitch if you're interested. Cheers, Dan Ts'o 212-570-7671 Dept. Neurobiology dan@rna.rockefeller.edu Rockefeller Univ. ...cmcl2!rna!dan 1230 York Ave. rna!dan@nyu.edu NY, NY 10021 tso@rockefeller.edu (Root Boy) Jim Cottrell National Bureau of Standards Flamer's Hotline: (301) 975-5688 The opinions expressed are solely my own and do not reflect NBS policy or agreement Life is a POPULARITY CONTEST! I'm REFRESHINGLY CANDID!!