dan@rna.UUCP (Dan Ts'o) (05/04/88)
Has anyone had any experience with WORM (write-once optical disks) drives ? Please mail me. Since you can buy a SCSI drive for $4000 and a SCSI controller for $1500 or less, I assume a major bottleneck is the non-trivial software interface, i.e. how to make a write-once device useful. Does anyone have any thoughts as to the "proper" approach to allow "transparent" filesystem- like access, especially under UNIX ? It seems to me that a fileserver daemon could be written to emulate a UNIX filesystem and hide the inherent issues of the WORM... Cheers, Dan Ts'o 212-570-7671 Dept. Neurobiology dan@rna.rockefeller.edu Rockefeller Univ. ...cmcl2!rna!dan 1230 York Ave. rna!dan@nyu.edu NY, NY 10021 tso@rockefeller.edu
dyer@spdcc.COM (Steve Dyer) (05/06/88)
Simpson Garfinkle designed and implemented a WORM filesystem (WOFS) while
at the Media Lab at MIT. It integrates most easily into a BSD UNIX
environment through an NFS interface; he had a prototype user-mode
NFS server running on a Sun. It also looks promising for the System
5.3 file system switch. You might contact him for more details:
simsong@athena.mit.edu should suffice.
Needless to say, a properly layered SCSI driver with media-dependent
top-ends (hard disk, tape, WORM) and a controller-dependent SCSI
bottom end is also essential. If you hunt for off-the-shelf drivers,
you'll usually find that a SCSI driver will insist on treating a WORM like
a hard disk, a paradigm which is at best incomplete.
--
Steve Dyer
dyer@harvard.harvard.edu
dyer@spdcc.COM aka {ihnp4,harvard,husc6,linus,ima,bbn,m2c}!spdcc!dyer