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From: ltf@killer.DALLAS.TX.US (Lance Franklin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.misc,comp.os.misc,comp.misc,comp.arch
Subject: Re: The NeXT machine has been announced! (long)
Message-ID: <5826@killer.DALLAS.TX.US>
Date: 16 Oct 88 08:44:52 GMT
References: <360@elan.UUCP> <2070@cloud9.UUCP> <528@fabscal.UUCP> <1152@mmm.UUCP>
Reply-To: ltf@killer.Dallas.TX.US (Lance Franklin)
Organization: The Unix(R) Connection BBS, Dallas, Tx
Lines: 47

In article <1152@mmm.UUCP> schultz@mmm.UUCP (John C Schultz) writes:
>A couple points about the 256 MB optical drive I have not seen mentioned.
>Summarizing my opinions, a 256 MB optical disk drive seems a tad too large or
>too small to be a really useful media system.
>
>Case A) - Software Distribution.
>
>It would seem that the best cost/performance ratio would occur if removable
>media were sized to typical distribution software.  I can just see people
>paying $50 media costs for 500 KB of data.  Even large programs such as GNU
>EMACS, TeX, and X11R2 fit on a 45 MB tape with room to spare.  WHAT TAKES 256
>MB to distribute??  It is easy to use 256 MB but not with one distribution. Oh
>I forgot about the complete works of Shakspeare to which I refer at least
>daily :-).

I think you're probably right on this count...a $50 dollar disk (even if it goes
down in price quite a bit in quanity) is NOT the kind of thing you want to be
distributing NeXT-Moria on.  Perhaps we'll see a SCSI-based floppy disk at some
time in the future for this machine (It DOES have SCSI, doesn't it?)

>Case B) - Backup
>
>If you have one 330 MB drive (which will not be enough - somebody's law), you
>need TWO disks to back it up.  A 660 MB is 3 disks, etc.  Why is the removable
>disk not a 1+ GB optical disk?  Cost?  Technology? Disk shuffling will still
>be a problem, escpecially if people implement 100+ networks of NeXT machines,
>each of which need to be backed up.

Well, I don't think it will necessarily take two 256k opticals to backup a 330
MB drive, considering most good backup programs do some kind of compression
on the data while moving it to the backup media...and usually, one doesn't
backup the entire system every time.  You do a total backup once, then
incremental backups every so often afterwards.

What confuses me is, the last time I heard, R/W optical disks had a definate
limit as to the number of writes that could be done...eventually, they just
stopped taking data reliably after ~n number of writes.  Is this a problem
with the NeXT drives...I hope not, since I've heard talk of swaps being done
to the drive when it's the sole mass storage device.

Lance
.
-- 
+-------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------+
| Lance T Franklin        | | I never said that! It must be some kind of a  |
| ltf@killer.DALLAS.TX.US | | forgery...I gotta change that password again. |
+-------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------+