jp@lanl-a.UUCP (10/12/84)
Does anyone have any info on optical hard disks or on using video disks to store digital information? The application is to replace 6250 bpi, 125 ips tape drives. Average data rate is .75 Mbytes/sec and a 2400 ft tape fills to 150 Mbytes in about 4 min. With 2 min to rewind a tape, two guys are kept busy just feeding tapes to two drives. This process results in writing about 3000 tapes during the course of the data acquisition activities. That is one helluva pile of tapes. If an optical disc system were available that could hold several tapes worth of data, it would be of immense interest. There is no requirement for random access. The files are created and read back sequentially. All that is needed is capacity, speed, and reliability. (Some error rate could be tolerated and some capacity could be sacrificed for redundancy or error correction.) If anyone has any information about the possibilities, immediate or future, for such a system, please let me know. Oh yes, the two drive tape system cost about $100K. Thanks, Jim Potter jp@lanl