Path: utzoo!hoptoad!amdcad!apple!amdahl!oliveb!cygnet!mark
From: mark@cygnet.CYGNETSYSTEMS (Mark Quattrocchi)
Newsgroups: alt.next
Subject: Re: The NeXT Problem
Message-ID: <1060@cygnet.CYGNETSYSTEMS>
Date: 19 Oct 88 17:11:23 GMT
References: <26435@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <7774@gryphon.CTS.COM> <9287@bigtex.cactus.org> <3311@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <9353@bigtex.cactus.org>
Reply-To: mark@cygnet.UUCP (Mark Quattrocchi)
Distribution: na
Organization: Cygnet Systems -- Sunnyvale, California
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In article <9353@bigtex.cactus.org> james@bigtex.cactus.org (James Van Artsdalen) writes:
>In <3311@pt.cs.cmu.edu>, ns@cat.cmu.edu (Nicholas Spies) wrote:
>
>> In article <9287@bigtex.cactus.org> I wrote:
>| [...] lighter.  Optics are apparently still very much more massive and could
>| well remain so indefinitely.
>
>> It's not too difficult to imagine that the optics of a WORM drive
>> read/write head could be reduced to a slender optical fiber leading to
>> a stationary laser.  [...]
>
>Well, at this point we need to find a drive designer to clear this up.
>But I assume a fiber optic strand would be heavier than a conducting
>metal wire.  Indeed, I wonder if the laser is a diode on the head
>instead of a fiber stretching the length of the arm.

The biggest weight factor in optical heads is not the laser but the focusing 
mechanism. Some manufacturers in the 12 inch arena even control the pitch of 
the head (for those really warped platters). I have noticed in the past few
years that the heads are getting much smaller which in turn gives a much
faster seek time. Since most optical vendors have now doubled capacity in the
past year, I suspect that seek times will be the next big jump to come. The
company I work for makes jukeboxes for both 12 and 5 1/4 inch optical disk 
drives and there are currently about 30 manufacters for 5 1/4r. I believe
after the initial falling out we will see optical drives coming very close
to approaching current hard disk access times.