SUMMARY: Erasable Optical Drive

From: Michael R. Zika (zika@trinity.tamu.edu)
Date: Fri Dec 16 1994 - 13:54:32 CST


  The original mail:

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  I checked the archives for a summary on this topic, but didn't
find anything relevant...

  We want to purchase an erasable optical drive system with a minimum
capacity of 1.0Gb per cartridge. I've looked mostly at the Artecon
1.3Gb EOD Subsystem which looks good, but I wanted some concrete
field experience before signing the PO for the product. Any experience
out there with this or other EOD systems (good or bad)? Any products
to definitely _avoid_?

  Many thanx in advance for the answers. As always, I'll summarize
all responses.
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  The respondents, in general, were pleased with the Artecon product.
Some of the specifics:

Optical Cartridges:

  o When a vendor claims a 1.3Gb optical cartridge, they really mean
    one cartridge with two 650Mb platters. The 1.3Gb is split into
    two physically separate partitions, so you cannot configure with
    a contiguous 1.3Gb partition.

MaxOptix 1.0Gb:

  o The default newfs parameters formatted the 500Mb down to ~350Mb
    per side, with tweaking, this was brought up to ~410Mb.

  o The software was a bit lacking.

Aretcon 1.3Gb:

  o Several people had _very_ good things to say about the hardware
    and software performance of the drive.

  o One person mentioned that the drive was a bit slow for their
    application.

  o A warning to make sure there was support for the latest release
    of the OS. I talked with Artecon, and their testing has shown
    no problems (so far) in using their EOD's with Solaris 2.4.

  Given the responses, we're going to order with the Artecon drive
and see how it works for our intended application. As always, thanks
for the prompt and helpful responses...

--Michael Zika Nuclear Engineering
  System Administrator Texas A&M University
  (409) 862-1158 zika@trinity.tamu.edu

  Specific thanks to the respondents:

peter@jrc.nl Peter Watkins
depuy@ssims.nci.nih.gov Scott Depuy
admin@gilligan.UCSD.EDU
sitongia@ncar.ucar.edu Leonard E. Sitongia
tcb@cipr-diva.mgh.harvard.edu Ted Beatie
worsham@aer.com Robert D. Worsham



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