jow@unccvax.UUCP (Jim Wiley) (11/06/86)
In article <2474@peora.UUCP>, joel@peora.UUCP (Joel Upchurch) writes: > ...WORM optical disk... > ...would not make good > paging devices because of the awful seek times and rather anemic > transfer rates associated with these devices. Has anyone seen > any optical disks with numbers in these categories comparable > to good magnetic disks? Optical Storage International has a WORM optical disk with a transfer rate of 262K bytes per second. Thats about half as fast as a ST506 winchester. The killer on the data rate is the 1.33M bits per second SCSI interface. I admit the seek time is poor, but SCSI seems to me to be a pretty brain damaged way to sacrifice performance for flexibility. The data tracks on the disk spiral inward so that once the proper track is found, any amount of data can be read or written without 'changing' tracks. At least it would be that way if SCSI could keep up. To stay on the same track requires the head to jump back once every revolution. Jim Wiley DataSpan, Inc.