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From: csimmons@hqpyr1.oracle.UUCP (Charles Simmons)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.misc,comp.os.misc,comp.misc,comp.arch
Subject: Re: The NeXT machine has been announced! (long)
Message-ID: <453@oracle.UUCP>
Date: 16 Oct 88 09:03:54 GMT
References: <360@elan.UUCP> <17479@gatech.edu>
Sender: news@oracle.uucp
Reply-To: csimmons@oracle.UUCP (Charles Simmons)
Organization: Oracle Corporation, Belmont CA
Lines: 25

In article <17479@gatech.edu> ken@gatech.UUCP (Ken Seefried iii) writes:
>	     I spent a little time doing work with optical disk technology,
>	     and it was far, far to slow to be primary main storage.  What
>	     magic has NeXT worked to make it suitable?
>
>	ken seefried iii	...!{akgua, allegra, amd, harpo, hplabs, 

Random question for the day...  Suppose I buy one of these NeXT
boxes, and I buy, say, a 30MB hard disk drive with 20 ms seek times
for something less than $1000.  Now, I attach this little drive
to my SCSI port.  At this point, I basically teach the operating
system to use the disk as a cache for the slower optical drive.

A few questions arise:

For Mach gurus:
	How hard will it be, using Mach, to implement the hard drive as
	a cache?

For cache gurus:
	Will 30MB be sufficiently large to significantly reduce
	the amount of accesses I need to make to the optical
	drive?

-- Chuck