SUMMARY: Small rewritable optical jukeboxes

From: Peter Trudinger (plt@rwp.dsto.oz.au)
Date: Mon Dec 23 1991 - 23:01:12 CST

Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]

The Original Request:

I am seeking information on and experiences with rewritable magneto-optical
jukeboxes. The sort of units I have in mind hold 10-20 5.25" platters.

I am particularly interested in finding out about the reliability of the
robot mechanism, software problems with the drivers, etc and any nfs
(or pcnfs) problems. However, I am sure that there are some angles that I,
in my innocence, have not even dreamt of.

Small jukeboxes are rare creatures in Australia. Products made by Pinnacle
Micro and QStar are available, but the installed base is minuscule (<10).

Commentary:

1. Some respondents make reference to reliability problems with the (IDE)
changer, as used, for example, in the Pinnacle Micro REO -6500. I
understand from a communication from Pinnacle through their local importer,
that this mechanism has recently been modified, and no problems have been
experienced in the month or so it has been shipping.

2. Our decision was not to proceed with the purchase of an optical jukebox
at this time. The number of positive responses was not enough to quell
our concern about the reliability of the products.

3. Thanks to the few who responded. The number of people who had such animals
was small enough to trouble us!

Peter Trudinger

Communications Division, ERL
Salisbury, SA Australia

plt@rwp.dsto.oz.au (shutdown till 6 Jan)
plt@dstos3.dsto.oz.au (over xmas/ny)

Responses received:

************

I was involved peripherally (so to speak :-) with the Pinnacle drivers
before the main author and I both left Sun. He is still working with
them, so I presume the drivers are still pretty good.

The jukebox we used worked just fine for us, and we were playing all
kinds of silly games with it.

l & h,
kev

Kevin Sheehan
Optimation Software Engineering
kevin.sheehan@fourx.aus.sun.com

***********

From: mark%bwnmr4@harvard.harvard.edu (Mark Anderson)

Hello Peter:
We here at Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston, Mass, recently
purchased a jukebox from Pinnacle. We got the reo6500 which holds 10 platters.
We purchased the drive about 6-8 months ago. Here are my opinions, and mine
alone:
1) each platter must be formatted on each side and newfs must be run on each
platter. For 10 disks, this is very time consuming (a whole day)
2) the capacity of a platter after formatting is only 237megabytes - in
medical imaging, which is what we do, this does not represent much capacity.
3) There is a little program that you run to swap platters. User Joe cant
swap platters if the currently-mounted platter was mounted by user Jane. This
can be a problem if you are going to be frequently swapping platters.
4) We had a number of problems with the robotics mechanism. Repairing the
robotics can be very time consuming for your system admin. person as the
machine must be halted and disks ejected.
5) We found that the machine frequently became "confused" and either thought
it had a platter mounted when it didn't, or vice versa.
6) It eventually became, for us, too time consuming to administer the jukebox
so we returned it.

On the positive side: Pinnacle folks were extremely helpful and good people
to do business with. They allowed us to trade our jukebox for other peripherals
at a very fair rate. They also were very knowledgeable when we had either
software or hardware problems and provided quick support.

I would suggest that you carefully consider what you want to use the jukebox
for. If you are constantly(say several times a day) swapping platters, you
may be inviting robotics problems and lots of sys. admin. overhead. Also,
if you would like the availability of more than 237megabytes at a time, you
may need a different solution.

As I said, these are my opinions, and my opinions alone.
I hope this information is helpful.

Mark Anderson

************

From: Doug Peterson <doug@USAN.consult.com>

Peter -

Qstar offers a line of Juke Boxes which includes the capacity you're looking for. They are in Bethesda, MD (USA), and can be reached at (301) 571-9338.
Their FAX number is (301) 493-9625.
Their Postal Address is:

        Qstar Technologies
        6701 Democracy Blvd., Suite 300
        Bethesda, MD 20817.

I have some experience with their 12" 50 platter system attached to a Sun file server. One of the key issues for that configuration was file system layout.
Data as a single large file can be transferred much more quickly than the same amount of data in separate small files (e.g. 200MB as a single file takes a couple of hours to store, but as a number of small files, requires almost a day to store. Retreival speeds are equivalent.

Access to multiple platters can be an issue, since the juke box only has two (in this case) drives, but the Qstar device drivers can support up to 8 simultaneously mounted platters (one side at a time).

Hope this helps.

Doug Peterson

*********

From: tom%yac.llnl.gov

Peter:

I have a unit from R-Squared that holds 10 platters. US List cost is < 18K.
It supports NFS extremely well (I don't acknowledge the existance of PCs
on my net, so I can't say anything about PCNFS!) I am quite pleased with
the device to date.

Check any of the recent Sun-market glossy rags for adverts of the R-squared
device. To my knowledge, the Pinnacle and QStar, etc., devices are all
strictly local archive devices and do not support true NFS access. I have
about 20 machines mounting my jukebox via NFS and have had no problems in
3 months with it.

Tom Slezak
Human Genome Center, L-452
Lawrence Livermore National Lab
7000 East Ave. Livermore, CA 94550
email: slezak@llnl.gov
phone: (510) 422-5746 fax: (510) 423-3608

*********

From: ron@arfalas.horizon.com (Ron McDaniels)

There is a company in Carlsbad, California by the name of Artecon (a
company with which I am not affiliated, so you KNOW I am objective :-) They
sell several juke box type 5.25" rewritable magneto-optical devices AND the
software that makes them useable (multiple workstations with multiple users
reading multiple platters loaded into multiple read/write stations - gets
complicated and *very* slow if you don't employ the right strategy to decide
which disc belongs in wich read station). ARTECON is at 2460 Impala Drive,
Carlsbad California 92008, +1 619 931 5500.

**********

From: Dave Sill <de5@stc06.ctd.ornl.gov>

I've worked with both the Pinnacle and R-Squared 10x5.25 units. Both
use the same IDE(?) robot with a Sony drive. The Pinnacle software is
more primitive than cuneiform. Only a single side of a single disk
(<300 MB) is available at one time.

The R-Squared comes with an Optical File System called AMASS. It uses
an ingres database, keeps a hard disk cache, does prefetching,
automatically mounts and unmounts disks, etc. It's pretty nice.

I'd rate the robot as a little on the flakey side. I've had it get
into funky states where I had to open it up and adjust the position of
the grabber or a disk. One unit came with a screw loose, which made
it so that disks couldn't be parked in the bottom slots.

The R-Squared unit was roughly twice the price of the Pinnacle.

Tech support for both is pretty good, and you'll probably need it.

-- Dave Sill (de5@ornl.gov) We have many things in common Martin Marietta Energy Systems Name three. Workstation Support -R.E.M.

**********

From: "Andrew Luebker" <aahvdl@eye.psych.umn.edu>

How about a long row of NeXT r/w "floptical" drives?

**********

From: mdl@cypress.com (J. Matt Landrum)

Please summarize, I am interested.

Be aware that there are two formats, Sample-Servo and Continuous Composite. If you call Mike Johnson at Computer Upgrade Corporation in Anaheim, CA, 800-874-8807, he can explain the difference.

*********

>From antoine%RadOnc.Duke.EDU Please summarize, I'm in that market also.

Thanks,

**********

From: rk@bartok.att.com (Ravi Kagalavadi - 59112)

Hi Scott, I work in Tom Houghton's group in Liberty Corner in SDE. I am forwarding this mail related to juke boxes.

Thanks Ravi Kagalvadi rk@bartok.att.com bartok!rk

**********

From: ron@arfalas.horizon.com (Ron McDaniels)

There is a company in Carlsbad, California by the name of Artecon (a company with which I am not affiliated, so you KNOW I am objective :-) They sell several juke box type 5.25" rewritable magneto-optical devices AND the software that makes them useable (multiple workstations with multiple users reading multiple platters loaded into multiple read/write stations - gets complicated and *very* slow if you don't employ the right strategy to decide which disc belongs in wich read station). ARTECON is at 2460 Impala Drive, Carlsbad California 92008, +1 619 931 5500.

**********

From: Arie Bikker <aribi@geo.vu.nl>

I would be interested in a summary.

Thanks,

Arie Bikker ___=======-----

------------------------------------ -- Drs. Arie Bikker -- -- Instituut voor Aardwetenschappen -- -- Vrije Universiteit -- -- Amsterdam Netherlands -- -- aribi@geo.vu.nl -- ------------------------------------ **********

From: mpeppler@itf0.itf.ch (Michael Peppler)

Could you let me know of any responses you get? I've been thinking about using a magneto-optical jukebox, and information regarding these beasts (especially reliability and speed) would be of great use to me!

Thanks a lot,

Michael

-- Michael Peppler mpeppler@itf.ch {uunet,mcsun}!chsun!itf1!mpeppler ITF Management SA BIX: mpeppler 13 Rue de la Fontaine Phone: (+4122) 312 1311 CH-1204 Geneva, Switzerland Fax: (+4122) 312 1322

Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:06:21 CDT