Hi netlanders!
I put an inquiry on Magneto-Optical drives on the net a while ago and got very
helpful infos back. Now that I have all the infos I wanted here is the summary:
There seem to be basically three different MO-devices. One is from Sony, one is
the Maxtor Tahiti II and Ricoh also manufactures one. I only have extensive
infos on the Maxtor and the Sony and all further comments relate to these two
drives. A new drive from Pinnacle Micro was also mentioned. They claim 1.4 MB
sustained transfer rate for this drive, so I assume this must be another device
but nobody has used it so far.
Both drives use cartridges with a capacity of ca. 650 MBytes, which is split to
both sides of the cartridge, so you can only access 1/2 of the capacity at one
time. The Tahiti II has an additional operating mode which uses 1GB cartridges.
The drives can be used whithout any drivers unless you want to operate the
Tahiti in the 1GB mode. Both drives seem to operate well when using the ISO
650 MB mode, but there are problems using the Tahiti in 1 GB mode. Media seems
to be an important issue as well and I got recommendations to use Sony.
The most important difference between both drives is the data transfer rate.
A couple of VERY NICE people ran some benchmarks for me on large files. The
SONY delivered dissapointing results:
data transfer for writing : ca. 70 KB / sec.
data transfer for reading : 150-230 KB / sec.
Maxtor:
data transfer for writing : 240-310 KB / sec.
data transfer for reading : ca. 560 KB / sec.
These results are for writing a 10 MB file with a blocksize of 8 KB and reading
it right back. The Tahiti II also has a much shorter average access time of
28 ms compared to 90 ms for the Sony. Pricing: (AKRO Datensysteme,
UnterschleiBheim, Germany, DM 1 = ca. US $ 1.50)
Sony: 4854.-, Sony media 264.-
Maxtor: 7153.-, 1 GB media 526.- (no price for ISO media yet)
We will buy a Maxtor Tahiti II and operate it in ISO mode. To end the summary
I would like to thank all who responded very much, especially those people who
ran the speed benchmarks for me!
Phil Antoine (antoine@RadOnc.Duke.EDU)
Claus Assmann <ca@idefix.informatik.uni-kiel.dbp.de>
James J Dempsey <jjd@spserv.bbn.com>
leg@inel.gov (Lance Eric Greenwade)
hofu@nlp.physik.th-darmstadt.de (Joachim Holzfuss)
mdl@cypress.com (J. Matt Landrum)
Seth Robertson <seth@ctr.columbia.edu>
danielle@systems.caltech.edu (Danielle Sanine)
kalli!kevin@fourx.Aus.Sun.COM (Kevin Sheehan)
ws@tools.de (Wolfgang Solfrank)
ukrainec@nimios.Eng.McMaster.CA (Andrew Ukrainec)
dunstan@gec-epl.co.uk (Dunstan_Vavasour)
tom@izf.tno.nl (Tom Vijlbrief)
nancy@aspiring.unh.edu (nancy voorhis)
kraussW@moravian.edu
wertz@carto.ssd.IMD.Sterling.COM (Mike Wertzberger)
Dave Wilmot <dawi@is-rocker.gwl.com>
Alex Zbyslaw <Zbyslaw@europarc.xerox.com>
ciao, Peter
DDD L RRR | Peter Baumann
D D L R R | Abt. SM-ES, DLR, Bunsenstr. 10, W-3400 Goettingen, FRG
D D L RRR | Tel. (0551) 709-2190
DDD LLLL R R | internet: baum@kirk.es.go.dlr.de
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:06:46 CDT