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From: leadley@uhura.cc.rochester.edu (Scott Leadley)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.dec,comp.periphs.scsi
Subject: Re: erasable optical scsi devices
Message-ID: <5386@ur-cc.UUCP>
Date: 21 Feb 90 21:11:55 GMT
References: <1990Feb21.180149.23857@ox.com>
Reply-To: leadley@uhura.cc.rochester.edu (Scott Leadley)
Organization: University of Rochester
Lines: 19

In article <1990Feb21.180149.23857@ox.com> osm@ox.com (Owen Scott Medd) writes:
 >We have a growing population of DECstation 3100s and a stable population of
 >Sun 3/50s.  Unfortunately (for our systems staff), the machines we've
 >traditionally had backup devices on are being replaced by these faster, newer
 >machines which don't have a bus to stick interface cards into.
 >
 >We are aware of the Exabyte solution, but what I'd really like is some
 >erasable optical disks that could be chained onto the scsi bus.  Using
 >them (the erasable optical disks) as dumb dump devices would be fine in
 >the short term, but I'd really like to use them as slow (but removable)
 >filesystems.

        As a totally off the wall suggestion, are you willing to stick your
neck out and try SCSI floptical disks on a disk array controller (e.g.
Maximum Strategy)?  It might be interesting to try.  Of course you're in deep
doodoo if you lose one of the set of floptical disks or mix them up, but nobody
said that being a pioneer was easy.
-- 
					Scott Leadley - leadley@cc.rochester.edu