Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!amdcad!ames!ll-xn!mit-eddie!husc6!cfa!ward
From: ward@cfa.harvard.EDU (Steve Ward)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Comments on NeXT.
Summary: Maxtor, erasable optical disk, fast, SCSI
Message-ID: <1246@cfa.cfa.harvard.EDU>
Date: 29 Sep 88 14:53:55 GMT
References: <30260@bbn.COM> <42@hi3.ACA.MCC.COM>
Organization: Harvard-Smithsonian Ctr. for Astrophysics
Lines: 28


...
Just to add another erasable optical disk to the list:

Maxtor has announced a new optical disk product.

I don't have the spec. sheet in front of me, so contact Maxtor for
the nitty-gritty.  Here are a few tidbits of info:

1.  standard full height 5 1/4" peripheral footprint and power
connection.
2.  SCSI host computer interface.
3.  high speed WRITE as well as read -- sorry, the spec sheet is in
my other office, so I can't attach "reality" to line
4.  can read/write two optical disk formats -- lagest capacity is
something like 640 MB/side
5.  I believe list price will be about $5995.00 and list price for
cartridges about $250.00
6.  Data sheets are available from Maxtor; you might even be able to
get a drive or two, but the last I heard, distributors would begin to
see the drive in January.
7.  Due to the WRITE "high speed" of the unit, Maxtor is touting it
as an alternative to tape for very high volume data archiving.  The
fact that it is erasable is nice, but for high volume archiving the
write speed (time to write Bigabytes) is more important.  After all,
you want to backup those disks in hours, not days.

Steven Ward  ward@cfa.harvard.edu