Erstad@HI-MULTICS.ARPA.UUCP (06/24/86)
We (and a number of other Apollo sites) are rapidly finding that using magnetic tape as a backup medium is becoming impractical. We are primarily Electronic CAD, and presently have about 4.8 Gb of disk storage, with lots of projected growth. Has anyone had experience using a high density optical (WORM type) drive on an Apollo system? I would prefer a Multibus interface but will look at an AT-Bus system. Key features needed are high density (i.e. > than the 120 MB we can get on a tape), stability of the media for archival purposes, and cost/unit of the optical media itself (must be low enough for use as a backup and frequent archival media). Drive cost is not as big of a concern. As they say, "Thanks in advance" Dave Erstadd Honeywell SSED The views expressed are my own only
JW-Peterson@UTAH-20.ARPA.UUCP (06/24/86)
Are you using 6250 bpi drives? We are using a kennedy 9400 drives here to backup about 2.5 Gb of disk. We found switching to the 6250 drive made a major improvement in doing the backups here. -------
Giebelhaus@HI-MULTICS.ARPA.UUCP (06/24/86)
I have heard that the 6250's don't work all that well. Do they really buy you that much more speed? Do they break down very often? How many times faster whould you guess your backups get done?
JW-Peterson@UTAH-20.ARPA.UUCP (06/24/86)
Our 6250 drive (Kennedy 9400) has worked out quite well for us. I don't believe there is a large time savings, because the drive doesn't have any influance on the time it takes to traverse the filesystem. We've had little problem with reliability. One thing that did make a noticeable speedup in the filesave time was switching the node the drive was attached to from a DSP-80 to a DSP-90. -------