Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!purdue!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!osu-cis!killer!usl!usl-pc!jpdres10
From: jpdres10@usl-pc.usl.edu (Green Eric Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Comments on NeXT.
Keywords: optical disks
Message-ID: <43@usl-pc.usl.edu>
Date: 3 Oct 88 17:09:42 GMT
References: <9291@swan.ulowell.edu>
Reply-To: elg@killer.UUCP (Green Eric Lee)
Organization: Univ. of Southwestern La., Lafayette
Lines: 35

In article <9291@swan.ulowell.edu> rsilvers@hawk.ulowell.edu (Robert Silvers) writes:
>     I assume that by "erasable" they mean that the optical disk can be
>erased, but can it be re-written?  I dont believe anyone has done this
>before, except for the Tandy thor drive, but that could only be written to
>30 or so times, and is 1-2 years away from release.  

Several companies have real-live existing magneto-optical disk drives,
most of which are promised for "Real Soon Now". The ones I'm most
familiar with are the Maxtor drives. They have a 160mb drive with 85ms
access time, and a 1 Gb drive with 40ms access time. Supposedly they
are writable as many times as ordinary disk drives. There are several
other companies out there using the same technology (which is
different from the technology Tandy is using). I don't have the
article with me right now, alas, so I can't tell you which is which.

Tandy has better publicists, apparently.

>I also heard that optical disks were much slower than hard disks.  

They are definitely slower, insofar as step rate is concerned -- which
is about double that of equivalent capacity "normal" drives. However,
as far as price/speed ratio is concerned, they still beat normal
drives. The Maxtor 1gb, for example, will be priced somewhere around
$2K-$3K... 1/4th the price of an Eagle, double the capacity, and less
than 1/4th slower.

> I would rather see this ship with a 120 Meg hard disk, and later add an
>optical disk when the technology is more reliable.  

The technology is reliable. The problem is that production hasn't
ramped up for any of the manufacturers yet. For example, Maxtor is
promising production quantities in the spring...

--
Eric Green    {backbone}!killer!elg