[comp.periphs] More advice sought for r/w optical system

kristi@arbs1.larc.nasa.gov (Kristi Skeens) (02/13/91)

I am seeking advice/recommendations for an optical disk storage system to connect to a PC. The disk will be hooked up to a system that will be retrieving atmospheric measurements in real-time, therefore, fast writing speed is a must.
I know very little about optical systems, so any information would be helpful.

Thanks in advance,
kristi skeens
kristi@arbs4.larc.nasa.gov

hue@island.COM (Pond Scum) (02/19/91)

In article <1991Feb13.134708.3440@news.larc.nasa.gov> kristi@arbs1.larc.nasa.gov (Kristi Skeens) writes:
>
>I am seeking advice/recommendations for an optical disk storage system to connect to a PC. The disk will be hooked up to a system that will be retrieving atmospheric measurements in real-time, therefore, fast writing speed is a must.
>I know very little about optical systems, so any information would be helpful.

SCSI Magneto-Optical drives typically write around 70k bytes/sec.  In order
to speed up writes, you have to keep the unused blocks on the disk in the
erased state.  If you do that, you can suppress the pre-erase pass during
writes and will see something around 200K bytes/sec.  I doubt any vendor
can supply a driver which does what I just described, so you'll probably
have to write your own.


-Jonathan	hue@island.COM